How to Articulate Flavor
Describing coffee can be a daunting task, but it vastly improves your experience and ability to share that experience with others. When we have words to put to the flavors we perceive (more succinct than the usual, "bold", "rich", "tastes like coffee", or "just how I like it"), we can bring the coffee's profile into delightful clarity. Differentiating between apple-y sweetness and chocolate sweetness also helps us bring others into the process, not to mention helps us choose which bags we want to purchase from the local roaster.
Enter in the Flavor Wheel. This is an excellent tool to help us locate and name the perceptions we're interpreting as we taste a black coffee or perhaps an espresso. The wheel gives us lots of ideas, like a giant multiple choice list, than let's us sort through which flavor notes match what we're tasting. In this training sheet and in the classes I teach, I further break down the flavor wheel into basic flavor modules that help you definitively and meticulously identify which flavors you are actually tasting.
Use this sheet when dialing in your coffee at home, when visiting your favorite local shop, or even when eating some spectacular food. We can actually learn a lot by focusing on the flavors we are coming across moment by moment, and not just relying on the automatic ideas our brain thinks we're perceiving. For example, have you ever eaten something rather mundane, such as your morning oatmeal, and actually paid attention to the flavors within? Oatmeal is classically bland, but even plain oatmeal has an inherent sweetness and small amount of nutty bitterness, like most grains. If you added cream, nuts, brown sugar, or dried fruit toppings, how does each one add saltiness, tanginess, sweetness?
Here's another example. Think of the best chocolate chip cookie you've had. What makes them superior? Perhaps the butter added to the cookie was browned, emphasizing the maillard reaction (a flavor our taste buds really really like!); maybe the chocolate used was a quality dark chocolate, bringing out a bitter contrast to the sweet dough; perhaps the salt garnishing the top is drawing out and enhancing all the sweet and umami flavors.
Being able to articulate what we taste is not just a skill for commodity coffee buyers or Q-graders (a loose equivalent to a Sommelier). It is a doorway into a more treasured life, one where we focus with curiosity on the little things we all take part in.
