Describing coffee through sensory analysis is a bit like high-performance sports. You train your ability to read it, expand your repertoire, and become faster at identifying individual flavor notes. However, not everyone can or wants to do that—and certainly not the majority of consumers. A plea for describing the body.
Cupping, the professional coffee tasting process where coffee is slurped, studied, and described, is a complex and often creative process.
You meet people from a wide variety of backgrounds, all of whom bring different vocabularies to describe the coffee. And if we are honest, most of us have a favorite description for certain stimuli or flavor notes in coffee.
After the cupping, we collect these descriptions, compare them, and discuss. A catalog of descriptions is created, from which we select the most useful ones to pass on. However, if these turn out to be green apple acidity, salted caramel, and ripe red grapes, most consumers will only shake their heads and are more likely to describe the same coffee as "different, special, and unusual."
In rare cases, consumers enjoy specialty coffee right away. Specialty coffee needs time to be communicated. Or a focus on the body.
Haptics vs. flavor notes
If someone has never tasted salted caramel, how are they supposed to decipher it in a product as complex as coffee? Or have you ever recognized a person on the street you didn't even know yet?
Flavor notes are more difficult to describe than sensory impressions. We all feel the latter in varying intensities. Body and mouthfeel (see also the 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 encourage coffee drinkers to pay attention to the mouthfeel, weight, and creaminess of the coffee while they drink it. We should not forget that not everyone does this automatically. Then, one can discuss whether the sensation is more like the consistency of tea or, perhaps, more like the consistency of honey.
describing the consistency of a coffee is usually easier for consumers than expressing themselves creatively about flavor notes.
A fellow judge once called me a "body fetishist" because I place so much value on describing the body of coffees. However, I am convinced that a precise description of the haptics can appeal to more people than creative inventions for describing flavor notes.
