Beginner's Guide to Tasting Coffee

5 Steps to understand your palate and identify flavors in coffee

If only recognizing the flavors of coffee were as simple as distinguishing the sounds of your favorite music.

The good thing about this sensory dilemma is that you don't need to be an expert to build confidence in your palate. All it takes is observation, a love for coffee, and a little patience to hone your practice.

Here are a few tips to help you get familiar with your palate and learn to interpret flavors better to articulate the language and love you have for coffee.

1. Start with the essentials

Success for this journey starts with a few essentials—clean water, proper temperature, consistent grind, and of course, fresh beans. No matter the brewing method, these four things are a priority when beginning your coffee tasting practice.

We encourage a low-key pour-over, and if you're new to manual brewing methods, we assure you, it doesn't require a ton of fuss. Check out our guide on mastering your cup!

2. Prioritize smell

Without smell, our sense of taste is quite minimal. Approximately 80%-90% of what we taste is an aroma.

Think of using your nose like a warm-up for your brain to understand what it's about to taste.

Smell the coffee beans before you grind, after you grind, as it blooms in the vessel, and once more, right before you sip.

There are a few specific aromatic categories you can look for with each sniff.

Floral, vegetal, or fruit-like aromas are expressions of the coffee's natural enzymatic properties. After all, coffee does come from the seed of a fruit! The fun part is noting how these aromas differ from region to region—a true testament to the terroir in coffee.

Toasted nuts, pastries, or cocoa are all notes you distinguish from the chemical reaction of heat exposure to amino acids and sugar. Different coffees produce different levels of sugar browning during the roasting process.

Wood, leather, and tobacco are unique and expressive aromatics created through the roasting process. Dry distillation happens when the fibers of the coffee bean burn. So the darker the roast, the stronger these scents will emanate.

Tip: Keep an observation notebook to write down what you smell at each level of this process. Compare notes on these three categories and their aromas side by side when trying coffees from different regions and different roasting levels.

3. Don't just sip, slurp

To optimize your tasting ability, be sure to slurp after you sip. Slurping aerates the coffee so that it covers the entire surface area of your tongue, hitting on all sensory receptors, sweet, salty, bitter, umami.

Tip: Taste the coffee at different times to observe changes in flavor at different temperatures. The best coffees are layered and complex and offer a range of flavors that can taste completely different from hot to cool.

4. Mindfully observe

There are five essential elements to observe when tasting coffee. Take note of these and ask yourself a few questions to begin fine-tuning your palate.

Sweetness

Typically, the better the coffee, the sweeter it tastes. Look for arabica coffees to better detect this particular element. When you identify sweetness, ask yourself what kind of sweetness you're tasting. Is it a fruity sweetness, or rather honey, caramel, or sugar? If it's fruity, is it more berry-like, melon, or citrus? Does it resemble more brown sugar than white? More butterscotch than chocolate? Is it dark chocolate or milk chocolate?

Acidity

The roast level disrupts our perception of acidity. Commonly detected more in lighter and medium roasts, acidity is a quality in coffee perceived through the juicy notes of fruit. The darker the roast, the more difficult these can be to identify. Are you examining more zest from lime as opposed to the tartness of a lemon? Or is there more tang like that of a melon?

Body

The body speaks to the weight of coffee on your tongue. Is it heavy like whole milk or lighter and tea-like?