Page 57 - #58 English

Flavor Wheel: Understanding Your Coffee Let me make a remark here: we are not talking

about artificially sweetened or flavored coffees, most
Thanks to our parents and their parents, we can obvious reason for what is beans’ low quality. Two
differentiate flavors in food, like that chicken tastes coffees might both earn 88 points but taste very dif-
like chicken and milk is milk. Besides that, we can also ferent from each other. That’s I why it is especially
say if the taste is good or bad and if a product is still important here to understand all the flavor “notes”
fresh. Unfortunately, not everyone of us develops their or “attributives” to bring and use a new tool that
palette to feel the whole range of flavors in one product, can equally use everyone else as it is a common
for example, coffee. For most of the people coffee tastes lexicon.
like just a coffee, while it can taste like peanuts, choc- The reason for updating the flavor wheel is that a
olate, coconut, grape, rose and even rubber and petro- lot has changed in 20 years: climate change, that forced
leum – depending on the quality, place of origin, farmers to develop heat-, drought-, disease-resistant
plantations’ environment and so on. coffee varieties, and growth of coffee industry, that
To depict those flavors people from coffee business brought more attention and people into the field, and
around the world needed some kind of lingua franca to of course science development. Of course, there’s a
be able to understand each others’ conclusions. For this subjective aspect to all of the senses, and how people
reason the Coffee Flavor Wheel was created in 1995 report what they see, taste, feel, smell and hear is often
(first flavor wheels were created for beers and wines) influenced by different factors like culture and memo-
and updated almost 20 tears later, last year in 2016. ry. But the more researchers turn their attention toward
Updated Flavor Wheel is the brainchild of coffee re- the ways in which groups of people report and categorize
searchers and the Specialty Coffee Association of those sensory experiences, the better sense scientists
America (now SCA), more science went into the proj- can make of them.
ect than you might think: sensory scientists from Kan- So next time you get a coffee, pause after you sip
sas State University created something called the World and think about what you taste: if it is sour, roasted,
Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon, a common language fruity, sweet or vegetative and here is a practical
for people to describe different coffee attributes, while guide how to get even richer experience from your
the flavors are based on identifiable chemicals in coffee cup of joe.

To step out of comfort zone

and try new pairings you

should focus on training

your palate.

59