Tasting Guide



Acidity
Taste those high, thin notes, the dryness the coffee leaves at the back of your palate and under the edges of your tongue? This pleasant tartness, snap, or twist, combined with an underlying sweetness, is what coffee people call acidity. It should be distinguished from sour or astringent, which in coffee terminology means an unpleasant sharpness. The acidy notes should be very clear, powerful and transparent in the Central Americans, rich and wine- or berry-toned in the East Africans, and deeper-toned and muted in the Indonesians. They should be drier in the Central Americans and perhaps a bit sweeter in the East Africans. Robustas and some lower-grown Arabica coffees may display virtually no acidity whatsoever and consequently taste flat and lifeless.
You may not run into the terms acidity or acidy in your local coffee seller’s signs and brochures. Many retailers avoid describing a coffee as acidy for fear consumers will confuse a positive acidy brightness with an unpleasant sourness. Instead you will find a variety of creative euphemisms: bright, dry, sharp, brisk, vibrant, etc. Acidity has NOTHING to do with Ph balance. In fact high grown, high quality has very little ph measured acid. Most drinks you consume have FAR more acid than coffee or espresso.
An acidy coffee is somewhat analogous to a dry wine. In some coffees the acidy taste actually becomes distinctly winey; the winey taste should be relatively clear in the East Africans. In promotional tags you may find the tones that I call winey described with other terms: fruity, dry fruit, and various specific fruit names, particularly berry and black current. The main challenge is to recognize the fundamental complex of fruit and wine-like sensations; once you do that, you can call them anything you like.
Body
Body or mouth-feel is the sense of heaviness, tactile richness, or thickness when you swish the coffee around your mouth. It also describes texture: oily, buttery, thin, etc. To cite a wine analogy again, cabernets and certain other red wines are heavier in body than most white wines. In this case wine and coffee tasters use the same term for a similar phenomenon. All of the sample coffees I recommend should have relatively substantial body - either the Central Americans or the Indonesians will be the heaviest and the East Africans - usually but not always a medium-bodied coffee - the lightest. In terms of texture or mouth-feel the Indonesians may display the most interest - perhaps an oily or gritty sensation. But avoid inventing something you fail to taste. None of these coffees will be thin-bodied or anemic.
There are many terms used to describe body but a key to successfully tasting body is to go by how it feels first and then describe the taste. Many times a heavy, bass guitar feeling comes across in heavy bodied coffees. Or terms like earthy, intense, heavy, full, rich, thick etc are used. Think in terms of music and think of the heavy beat of a drums as body and the guitar riffs as acidity.
Aroma
Strictly speaking, aroma cannot be separated from acidity and flavor. Acidy coffees smell acidy, and richly flavored coffees smell richly flavored. Nevertheless, certain high, fleeting notes are reflected most clearly before the coffee is actually tasted. There is frequently a subtle floral note to some coffee that is experienced most clearly in the aroma, particularly at the moment the crust is broken in the traditional tasting ritual. Of the three coffees I recommend for your tasting, you are most likely to detect these fresh floral notes in the East Africans, but depending on the roast and freshness of the coffee you could experience it in any of the three samples. Latin-American coffees brought to a medium roast, like the Central Americans, may display a sweet vanilla-nut complex in aroma. The Indonesians also may exhibit smoky, pungent, earth-like, or spicy notes. Finally, if your Central Americans is a La Minita, the aroma should have a sort of echoing, resonant depth to it. The same should be true of the East Africans, whereas you may find that the aromatic sensations of the Indonesians are rather immediate and limited, without a sense of dimension opening behind and around them.
Finish
If aroma is the overture of the coffee, then finish is the resonant silence at the end of the piece. Finish is a term relatively recently brought over into coffee tasting from wine connoisseurship. It describes the immediate sensation after the coffee is spit out or swallowed. Some coffees develop in the finish - they change in pleasurable ways. All high quality coffees should develop positively in the finish. I would predict that the pungent tones of the Indonesians may soften toward cocoa or chocolate in the finish, and the dry wine or berry tones of the East Africans turn sweeter and fruitier.
Flavor
Flavor is a catch-all term for everything we do not experience in terms of the categories of acidity, aroma and body. In another sense, it is a synthesis of them all. Some coffees simply display a fuller, richer flavor than others, are more complex, or more balanced, whereas other coffees have an acidy tang, for instance, that tends to dominate everything else. Some are flat, some are lifeless, some are strong but mono-toned. We also can speak of a distinctively flavored coffee, a coffee whose flavor characteristics clearly distinguish it from others.
The following are some terms and categories often used to describe and evaluate flavor. Some are obvious, many overlap, but all are useful.
Richness
Richness partly refers to body, partly to flavor; at times even to acidity. The term describes an interesting, satisfying fullness.
Range
Imagine that the sensations evoked by a mouthful of coffee are a musical chord. Then take note of where the main interest and complexity of sensation is concentrated. The East Africans will have great complexity throughout, but particularly in the higher ranges, the equivalent of treble notes. The Indonesians, if it is a good one, will be very complex in the lower ranges, the equivalent of base notes. The Central Americans will be more integrated and total, perhaps with sensation more concentrated in the middle range. Complexity. I take complexity to describe flavor that shifts among pleasurable possibilities, tantalizes, and does not completely reveal itself at any one moment; a harmonious multiplicity of sensation.
Balance
This is a difficult term. When tasting coffees for defects, professional tasters use the term to describe a coffee that does not localize at any one point on the palate; in other words, it is not imbalanced in the direction of some one (often undesirable) taste characteristic. As a term of general evaluation, balance appears to mean that no one quality overwhelms all others, but there is enough complexity in the coffee to arouse interest. It is a term that on occasion damns with faint praise. The Central Americans sample should be most balanced, although it probably has less idiosyncrasy to balance than the other two coffees. The East Africans should be both complex and balanced; the Indonesians may be imbalanced by overbearing pungent tones and may be a bit rough.