After years of development, specialty coffee has formed a scientific system, with a very complete knowledge system from the cultivation and processing of green beans to roasting, brewing and tasting.
The improvement of green bean quality, roasting and brewing quality will ultimately provide us with a better experience in coffee tasting. So learning to taste is actually an important part of learning coffee. There are also some professional courses in coffee tasting, such as Q-Grader (coffee quality appraiser) for industry insiders and SCA coffee sensory tasting course for coffee lovers.These courses can play a role in sorting out knowledge and correcting the sense of coffee flavor for friends who have a certain foundation of coffee knowledge. For a pure novice, there is a huge difference between the high tuition fees and the knowledge absorbed. Therefore, Front Street does not recommend that novices sign up for coffee courses enthusiastically. They can observe and learn some basic coffee knowledge that is readily available, and it is not too late to make a choice.
Of course, the booming development of specialty coffee has also attracted many friends who want to learn about coffee, including some who are eager to learn to taste the flavor of coffee. They also want to be able to blurt out dozens of flavor descriptions when drinking a certain coffee like coffee professionals. Regarding the question of where to start learning coffee tasting for novices, Front Street has some suggestions. Friends who are interested can try to follow suit.
If you ask a barista, "Why are you so sensitive to the flavor of coffee?" the reply you will probably get is "Drink it regularly, and you will be able to taste the flavor of coffee if you drink more."
This is actually very reasonable. All coffee flavors or taste memories are accumulated through constant tasting and memory. Unless you have an "emperor's tongue" or a super memory and can not forget it after tasting it, you still have to drink coffee often and remember the characteristics of each coffee.
Even if you take a professional coffee tasting course, you still need to accumulate a flavor library by constantly tasting coffee, otherwise all you will get back after spending high tuition is a certificate.
-Put aside the flavor first and judge the taste
If you force yourself to express some flavor from the beginning, it would be a bit overwhelming and too hasty. Coffee tasting is a long-term accumulation process, and there is no crash course. If you are a novice who is learning to taste and describe the flavor of coffee but starting from scratch, Front Street recommends that you forget about flavor descriptions and start with the most basic drink of coffee and express your feelings.
Coffee sensory perception is a relatively subjective judgment, which depends on personal taste preferences and sensitivity to various flavors. Coffee tasting is both subjective and objective. That is to say, when you taste a coffee, you cannot judge it based on your own preferences, but you can describe it objectively. You can describe how it tastes.
It is the easiest to identify the taste of a cup of coffee, because there are only five flavors: sour, sweet, bitter, salty and fresh, and most coffee only has three flavors: sweet, sour, bitter and sour. For example, when we taste a washed Yirgacheffe coffee bean, we can taste a very obvious sourness at the first sip. At this time, we need to judge whether the sourness is pungent and sour, sweet and sour fruity sour, soft and slightly sour, or fermented acetic acid.
When you taste a Brazilian coffee bean, you can clearly notice that the coffee is full of bitterness, but we need to judge whether this bitterness is a comfortable bitterness, a strong irritating bitterness, or an extremely uncomfortable burnt bitterness, or bitterness with sweetness, or a little sweetness from the bitterness, a bit of chocolate.
Use this analogy to try different types of coffee and rank them. For example, the three coffees A, B, and C are all sour coffees, but if the order of acidity is A>B>C, judging by the acidity, the acidity of A is a bit irritating, sharp, and uncomfortable. Although B is also very sour, it tastes very comfortable and enjoyable. C has a good sour and sweet taste, sour and sweet, like drinking complex juice.First, remember the taste of coffee in this way, and develop the ability to subconsciously appreciate the taste of coffee when drinking coffee.
-Understanding flavor
What we describe as coffee flavor is composed of taste and aroma. The aroma of coffee is the source of many flavors. The reason why we use other physical objects to describe the flavor of coffee is that on the one hand, we can taste the taste of coffee similar to other physical objects (fruits), and on the other hand, it can also allow people who have never tasted this coffee to get a taste portrait of this coffee. Therefore, the flavor descriptions we use are some common and frequently eaten foods in daily life.
Front Street gives you an example to facilitate your understanding. If the barista tells you that this coffee bean tastes like strawberry, you can break it down and understand that in terms of taste, the sweetness and sourness of the coffee beans is similar to that of berries such as strawberries. In terms of aroma, you can feel the aroma characteristics of strawberry in the coffee.
For example, in the coffee flavor description, rose, jasmine, vanilla, mango, roasted sweet potato, honey (water) are all reflected by the aroma. Therefore, in addition to drinking more coffee and tasting more coffee, you also need to carefully taste the aroma characteristics of the food around you. Only by memorizing these flavors in the flavor library of the brain, can you immediately react to what flavor it is when you smell a similar aroma in coffee next time.
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
