Describing coffees sensorially is akin to top-level sports. You train your perception, expand your repertoire, and become increasingly quick at identifying individual flavor notes. However, not everyone does, can, or wants to do this. Certainly not the majority of consumers. A plea for describing the body.
Cupping, the professional coffee tastings where coffee is slurped, studied, and described, is a complex, sometimes creative process.
You meet people from various backgrounds, all bringing different vocabularies to describe coffees. And if we're honest, most of us have a favorite description for certain triggers or flavor notes in coffee.
After cupping, we collect these descriptions, compare, and discuss them. A catalog of descriptions emerges, from which we want to take and pass on the most useful ones. But if these are Green apple acidity, salted caramel, and ripe red grapes, most consumers will just shake their heads and describe the same coffee as "different, special, and unusual" instead.
In rare cases, consumers immediately like specialty coffee. Specialty coffee needs time for communication. Or a focus on body.
Tactile vs. Flavor Notes
If someone has never tasted salted caramel, how are they supposed to decipher it in a complex product like coffee? Or have you ever recognized a person on the street whom you didn't even know yet?
Flavor notes are harder to describe than sensory impressions. We all feel those in different intensities. Body and mouthfeel (see also article on mouthfeel) often differ dramatically between individual coffees and serve as an indication of quality. The mouthfeel of good coffee differs greatly from mediocre coffee, and even more so from lower quality coffee.
I like to draw coffee drinkers' attention to the mouthfeel, weight, and creaminess of coffee when drinking. We should not forget that not everyone does this automatically. Then we can discuss whether the feeling is more like the consistency of tea, or rather more like the consistency of honey.
Describing the consistency of coffee is usually easier for consumers than creatively expressing flavor notes.
A fellow judge once called me a "body fetishist" because I place so much emphasis on describing the body of coffees. But I am convinced that a precise description of the tactile qualities can appeal to more people than creative descriptions of flavor notes.
