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Training taste – from average to professional

Most people’s sensory capabilities start from a same point,
the gap is formed mostly by ‘conscious tasting’. It is influenced
by your preferences and daily habits. It is like girls are more fa-
miliar with aroma of lavender and rose, or you are very sensitive
to apple’s sweetness and sourness because you like to eat
apples,the more you like something, the more you are going to
experience it. Time and time again, this enhance your familiarity
of this kind of flavor and you can guess it immediately during
cupping. This is a series of reactions and it is also basics of coffee
tasting training.
This is also why it is very important to learn cupping form and
score tables,we need to understand words’ meaning, what stands
behind them. We can start to look for flavor description examples
in life: for example, the level of sourness of pure lemon juice is too
high, but if we add some honey to it, the strength of sourness remains
2 Flavor description the same but quality of sourness is getting better and milder (ac-
companied by proper sweetness). In this way, we need to be open
Flavor description is a difficult point to different flavors, don’t be afraid of your first impression. In the
for coffee newcomers. Newbies always have meanwhile, you should figure out the coffee beans features in an
feeling like coffees are similar. Unless cof- objective and serious way. Only by combining two ways, we can
fee beans have a certain outstanding feature make right flavor description.
that recall your memory of previous tasting
experience, for example, sun processed
coffee vs. dried pineapple, it will make it
hard to describe its flavor. Actually, flavor
description is not an answer that appeared
suddenly in your brain. First of all, you
need to enhance your sensory experiences
in daily life so that you can enlarge your
sensory-feeling scope and try to under-
stand and describe what you are drinking.
If you think something is sour, try to tell
out which kind of sourness, sort of fruit?
Which kind of sweetness, caramel? Then
you try to analyze your feeling and improve
your understanding of tasting. The defini-
tion of flavor by SCAA (Specialty Coffee
Association of America) is the features
represented majorly by coffee, and com-
prehensive impression of tasting by tongue
and smelling by nose. So, when you de-
scribe a flavor, you need to take fragrance
strength, quality and complexity into
consideration.
If you want to learn systematically,
you can start with some professional tools,
like flavor wheel and coffee nose… it is not
hard to find that the flavors in the wheel
have great relationship with our daily meals
and life. When you have these tools, re-
member to practice and practice again,
make use them to the fullest!

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