Learning to
Taste
A companion to the SCA Sensory Skills Foundation course. Read it before class to prepare, and after class to review. Every idea here connects back to one skill: tasting with attention, and describing what you taste in shared language.
Seven sections, three practice tools.
Assessment is a method,
not a mood.
Sensory assessment is a scientific method used to provoke, measure, analyze, and interpret human responses to a product, through the five senses. In coffee it matters because flavor cannot yet be predicted from chemistry. A cup tells us more than any lab number.
Coffee professionals taste to decide: which variety to grow, which process to apply, which roast curve to run, which brew recipe to keep. WHY WE CUP
Two kinds of assessment
What is in the cup
Objective. Identify and quantify each attribute of the coffee. Sometimes performed by a trained and calibrated panel.
Descriptive assessment answers: what does this coffee taste like?
How much it is liked
Subjective. Measures how much a coffee is liked or preferred by the people tasting it.
Affective assessment answers: do we like it, and how much?
Both matter, and they answer different questions. The discipline is knowing which one you are doing at any given moment.
Flavor lives in three
senses at once.
Flavor is not one sense. Taste, smell, and touch combine into a single impression.
Orthonasal in through the nose; retronasal up from the back of the mouth.
Two ways to smell
Orthonasal smell travels in through the nose as you breathe in. This is fragrance and aroma, the smell of the world around you.
Retronasal smell rises from the back of the mouth as you breathe out. This is the aroma inside flavor and aftertaste. It is why a slurp, which sprays coffee and air across the palate, reveals so much.
Five tastes,
calibrated by hand.
There are five basic tastes: sour, sweet, bitter, salty, and umami. In coffee, sourness and bitterness carry the most weight; saltiness and umami are present too, more quietly.
In the calibration exercise, each taste is mixed into water at a set strength, and you taste the five side by side against a water blank. Use the calculator to scale a batch to any volume.
Taste solution calculator
Set your batch volume. Standard strengths for each solution are defined per liter and scaled for you.
| TASTE | INGREDIENT | AMOUNT |
|---|---|---|
| Sour (acidic) | Citric acid | 500 mg |
| Sweet | Sucrose (table sugar) | 10.00 g |
| Bitter | Caffeine | 500 mg |
| Umami | MSG | 600 mg |
| Salty | Sodium chloride (table salt) | 1.60 g |
| Water blank | Same water as the solutions | 1000 mL |
Standard strengths per liter. Caffeine is toxic in quantity: measure with care. A stronger reference set uses sucrose at 20 g/L and citric acid at 1.5 g/L.
Nine categories,
from center to edge.
SCA / WCR / UC Davis Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel, 2016. Read from the center outward, general to specific.
How to read it
Start at the center with the nine broad categories. Move outward as your confidence grows: fruity becomes berry becomes blackberry.
An attribute is a descriptive word, like citrus. A reference is a real food that anchors it, like lemon. The WCR Sensory Lexicon holds the references behind the wheel.
Train one category at a time. Smell a reference, name it, then find it in a real cup.
Category explorer
The nine families of the Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel. Tap one to see how it reads in the cup, with the reference foods that anchor it.
An aroma reference kit. Smell one reference for each of the nine categories to train recognition, then find it in a real cup.
Acidity, bitterness,
and mouthfeel.
In coffee, tastes and aromas never appear in isolation. One sensation can lift or mask another. Three qualities anchor most tasting notes.
Words for texture
The standard way to
taste side by side.
Cupping is a standard method: several cups per sample, each ground and brewed the same way, tasted together. It is used at every step of the value chain, from farm to roastery.
One sample, five cups: three bowls in the front row, two behind, each brewed the same way. A spoon and a rinse glass complete the set.
Step by step
The room and the table
The environment shapes the assessment, so it is controlled. A good cupping room is odor-free, well lit, quiet, and steady in temperature and humidity.
What belongs
Cupping bowls, spoons, rinse water.
What waits elsewhere
Scales, laptops, flowers, personal drinks.
Breaking the crust. Push the round spoon through the floating grounds and lean in; this is the most intense aroma of the cup.
The seven attributes,
defined.
The orthonasal smell of the dry, ground coffee, before any water is added.
The orthonasal smell of the brewed coffee, assessed right after the crust is broken.
Taste and retronasal smell together, while the brew is in the mouth, perceived as one impression.
The taste and retronasal smell that linger after the brew is spat or swallowed.
The perception of a sour taste provoked by the brew, varying in intensity and character.
A perceived sweet quality in the cup, largely driven by aromatics rather than sugar content.
The tactile feel of the brew, excluding temperature: its weight, viscosity, texture, and astringency.
Knowledge check.
Eight questions in the spirit of the written exam. Tap an answer to see feedback; your score tallies at the end.
Test yourself
Multiple choice, single correct answer, like the SCA written exam.