Coffee Tasting

Coffee tasting is a professional practice done by Master Tasters, but of course can also be done informally by anyone as a hobby or simply a home interest. Coffee tasting is widely practiced over the entire world and it involves observing the tastes and aromas of coffee, which can be done in many different ways and different places by different people. Very much like wine tasting, coffee tasting has a very simple procedure:

• Inhale the coffee aroma
• Slurp the coffee
• Take it to the back of the tongue

Coffee is then often spit out and discarded.

Coffee Tasting Tips

When tasting coffee, you are aiming to measure how the different aspects of the coffee are affecting the taste and how they produce the final flavour. One of the main things you are looking for is the body of the coffee. To define the body of coffee, you are looking for:

• Texture
• Oiliness
• Flavour
• Acidity
• Sweetness
• Aftertaste

Coffee Aromas

With such a wide variety of coffee beans, there is always a range of bodies with many different flavours, that can be recognised from the region where they were grown and more experienced coffee tasters will attempt to predict the coffee's origin. There are many aromas to recognise and some are very distinct from others:

• Animal-like
• Ashy
• Burnt/Smoke
• Chocolate coffee
• Caramel
• Cereal/Malty/Toast-like
• Earthy
• Fruity/Citrus
• Grassy/Green/Herbal
• Nutty, Spicy
• Tobacco
• Winey
• Woody

Coffee Taste

Coffee aroma is not the same as coffee taste and the taste of a coffee taste is also much easier to distinguish compared to recognising the aroma and especially the region where the coffee was grown. The range of different coffee tastes include:

• Acidity
• Bitterness
• Sweetness
• Saltiness
• Sourness