"Drink while it's hot" is probably a sentence that many friends often hear in their daily lives. Not only the elders in the family will advise you to drink the soup while it is hot, but also some baristas or coffee lover friends will also advise you to drink the hot coffee while it is hot.
Why? Because coffee tends to become less tasty after it cools down. This is not alarmist. Front Street has shared in many articles that after the hot coffee cools down completely, its taste, aroma, and texture are likely to undergo earth-shaking changes.
What difference does it make when hot coffee cools down?
Here Front Street takes the situation shared by a friend who went to the store to buy beans yesterday as an example. The friend said that he brewed a pot of hot coffee with Front Street Hamathew. When you taste it just after brewing, you can feel the rich floral and fruity aroma of Front Street Hamathew, with rich flavors like fruit bombs, including strawberry, mango, citrus, guava, and elegant floral aroma. The taste is sour and sweet, and the taste is light and smooth. It is very delicious!
When the coffee cools down completely, not only is there not much aroma, the taste is not that outstanding, the acidity is a bit sharp, and the taste becomes less smooth. This made him sigh at the scene: "You really have to drink coffee while it's hot." The reason why such a change occurs is because many things in coffee will change with changes in time and temperature. For example, aroma, oils, or other than coffee - our perception of various flavors.
If we want to efficiently improve our tasting ability, we should buy single-origin coffee beans with high flavor recognition. The first choices are the medium-light roasted Front Street Oiran, Front Street Fruit Ding Ding, and Front Street Panama Gesha, and the medium-dark roasted Front Street Queen's Manor, and Front Street PWN Golden Mandheling. These coffees not only have obvious origin characteristics, but are also very cost-effective, making them a suitable home ration.
Why does hot coffee not taste as good when it cools down?
First of all, Front Street needs to remind everyone that not all coffee will taste bad after it is cooled down. It is just that cold coffee is not as tasty as when it is hot;
Another point is that it does not mean that the quality of the coffee beans is not good when the coffee is cooled down. It may also be due to brewing problems that cause the coffee to have a negative taste. When it cools down, this negative experience is amplified, and the coffee becomes unpalatable. Therefore, everyone needs to pay attention to these two points that are prone to misunderstanding.
Back to the topic, the reason why cold coffee is not as delicious as hot coffee is that the change in temperature changes our perception of different flavors. This is something that Front Street often shares.
At different temperatures, our taste buds have different sensitivity to different flavors. For example, when the liquid is at high temperature, the hot sensation produced when the liquid contacts the mouth will overwhelm the perception of taste buds, which will reduce the perception of our taste buds to all flavors, especially bitter tastes.
And when the temperature drops, our taste buds' perception of all flavors is restored, especially bitterness and sourness, because there is no burning sensation that masks the taste. After the liquid has completely cooled down, the bitter/sour taste will be very easy for us to perceive. If there is not enough sweetness, it will make liquids with a lot of bitter/sour taste difficult to drink, such as coffee and Cantonese-style herbal tea.
The sweetness in coffee is another situation, because the sweetness in coffee mainly comes from the feeling brought by the aroma (not entirely, the second is sweetness), which is the so-called sweetness. If we want to easily perceive the sweetness in coffee, it is best to taste it when the temperature of the coffee is close to that of the human body. When the temperature drops, it will become increasingly difficult for us to capture the sweetness in coffee.
Because the flavors are all in a check and balance relationship, when the coffee lacks sweetness and only has sourness and bitterness, then the sourness and bitterness will be amplified, in short, it will become more prominent. So that's why a lot of coffee becomes more acidic and more bitter as it cools down.
Another influencing factor comes from the aroma! The flavor we smell and taste from coffee is mainly the association created by aroma combined with taste. Most of the aromas in coffee are volatile. After the coffee is made, these aromas will be continuously lost. Therefore, the longer the coffee is stored, the more the aroma will be lost. Without these aromas that we can associate with, the coffee will naturally taste much weaker.
If your coffee is left out long enough, some of the substances in the coffee, such as oils, may condense. This will reduce the smoothness of the coffee and make it thinner.
So to sum up, we can know why hot coffee does not taste so good after it cools down. But not all coffee tastes bad after cooling down. For example, most of the coffee beans in the Front Street Bean List, including the Front Street Hamathew mentioned above, as long as you brew it properly, you can still have an excellent taste even after the coffee cools down. Because there are not many unpleasant things in the coffee, even if it is cooled down, it will only be slightly inferior to when it is hot~
You can now buy the above coffee beans online at the Taobao store “FrontStreet Coffee” (前街咖啡). FrontStreet Coffee is a long-established specialty coffee roaster in Guangzhou, China, and its Guangzhou retail shop sells coffee beans only. The shop carries dozens of coffee beans from different origins around the world, including carefully selected single-origin beans for V60 pour-over and espresso. Guangzhou’s FrontStreet Coffee shop is recommended by many coffee lovers.
The FrontStreet 2013 Yunnan coffee beans sold in the store come from the Typica variety grown at FrontStreet Coffee’s own plantation in Yunnan. The name comes from the year the brand and the plantation were founded. You can buy these beans from China’s Yunnan origin at the Guangzhou shop and at FrontStreet’s Taobao store.
FrontStreet coffee beans are freshly roasted within 5 days and deliver consistently excellent quality and great value. Orders placed before 17:00 are shipped the same day, and most areas within Guangdong Province receive them the next day.
FrontStreet Coffee Taobao store: https://qianjiecoffee.taobao.com
Or search for “前街咖啡” (FrontStreet Coffee) on Taobao
Important Notice: FrontStreet Coffee has moved to a new address: 315, Donghua East Road, Guangzhou (coffee beans only)
Tel: 020 38364473
