Wednesday, July 02, 2003


how to talk about coffee. . .

after recent events in new york i have a pile of fresh coffee i'm tasting.

and so we pick up with my stupid obsession on the language of coffee. i'm writing this to help clarify my own confusion and i hope it may help 1 or 2 of you others here. because i know i'm not alone in my interest in learning to taste and discuss coffee. . .

to aid in this discussion, please check out the scaa flavor wheel and my jpg on the components of coffee bouquet.

my thanks to ted lingle for allowing me to alter his diagram in a way that i hope clarifies it and helps my dumb mind wrap around it. i hope it is helpful to all.

you should look at the jpg before you turn to the flavor wheel. i will be talking *only* about the right-hand side of the flavor wheel right now.

my apologies to those of you for whom this is elementary, and my double-apologies to those of you who believe talking about coffee this way equal to scribbling with crayons over an original mozart score. (you know who you are!)

i'm just trying this out, ok? i therefore beg your indulgence. consider me already beaten with a stick. finally, these terms aren't absolute, right?

coffee, as we all know, is quite a pile of chemistry. it is made of various stuffs that we experience in different ways, at different times, and in different places in our mouth. as ted lingle likes to say "that which does not dissolve or become a gas can only be felt in the mouth."

this statement is the basis for the parts of coffee we talk about: the body (what you feel in the mouth); the bouquet (gases & vapors); the taste (the solubles). all of these form the flavor of coffee.

i'm going to focus on *bouquet*. now let's look at that jpg. there you will see the 4 components of the bouquet: the fragrance, which comes from the fresh grounds; the aroma, which comes from pouring water over the coffee (what's happening when you break the crust in a formal cupping); the nose, when the coffee hits the back of your mouth (ted always uses the term "retro-nasal" here); and the aftertaste, which i think we can all figure out.

note that each of the 4 parts belong to 1 of 3 sets. these sets correspond to the root terms on the right-hand side of the flavor wheel, the part labelled aromas. for our purposes, it perhaps should also be labelled bouquet, because these terms are the bouquet descriptors.

the 3 sets are set one, enzymatic and its derived terms, jasmine, blackberry etc. set two, sugar browning, and its terms like almond, honey, etc. set three, dry distallation, and its terms, nutmeg, tarry, etc. note that in the bouquet diagram set two is the largest, having the most components.

so when we talk about the fragrance of coffee, the smell of the fresh grounds, we are unlikely to use a descriptor from set two, like chocolate-ly.

this is because the compounds in coffee that give the chocolate feeling are not likely to be experienced until later on in the coffee. and likewise, we probably wouldn't describe the aftertaste of a coffee as floral.

ok. so now we know what terms make more sense when. we also have some modifiers, like rich, full or flat, that i won't talk about now.

but another important term to note is the roast level of the coffee. when doing this, we should avoid the wacky but traditional, french, italian, etc.

we should try out the scaa terms, which most of us know from ken davids' "coffee" book. i mean, light, medium-dark, etc. together all of this will give us a 4 or 5 term descriptor for a coffee's bouquet.

for example, let's take that yrg, roasted to what i think is scaa medium. of this coffee we could say: lemony (actually to me it was more like grapefruit, but hey, we're still talking citrus here). that's set one.

then after breaking and doing the big thunderous hilarious slurp (just a little liquid in the spoon please!), i would add: nutty (again, i thought more hazelnut, but now you're with me, right?); and finally after wandering around (not sticking my head out the window) a bit, spicy (in specific, i would say cinnamon or allspice personally.)

talking this way gives us a more concise vocabulary for discussing coffee -- no need for prose poems here -- and one that we all can understand. a great help. it does also have the comfort of being somewhat scientifically based on the actual compounds in the coffee. all good!

so after plowing through all of this, i'm hoping that you all will take a look at the bouquet jpg and the flavor wheel and offer your thoughts in the comments below.

then later maybe i'll continue to annoy everyone by rambling on about the taste triangle and the left-hand side of the flavor wheel. . . .

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