When describing coffees, it's about more than just identifying aromas and flavors. Especially the two categories of body and texture, where we feel and not taste, help us to understand coffee even better and recognize truly good quality.
There's something enjoyable about describing coffees sensorially. It's fun to identify aromas, categorize them, and delve into the coffee. It's a multifaceted, sometimes creative process. When you taste coffees with others, it becomes even more colorful – people with diverse backgrounds, all bringing different vocabularies to describe the coffees, exchange their impressions of the same coffee.
This creates a catalog of descriptions, from which we can adopt and store the most useful ones. In the next tasting, we can recall these descriptions and continuously expand our catalog. Various protocols allow us to document this in writing.
Of smelling, tasting, and feeling
Especially in tastings with others, it often becomes apparent how differently coffees can be described in terms of aromas and flavors. When there's talk of a green apple acidity, salted caramel, and ripe, red grapes, most consumers might shake their heads and describe the same coffee more as "different, special, and unusual." For coffee people, however, this can be precisely the incentive to describe the aroma of a coffee with increasing precision.
However, precise descriptions of aromas are always associations with things we already know. We can only recognize smells and flavors in coffee that we are already familiar with.
So, we must first know what caramel is, and then try to find the similarities of caramel in a coffee. This takes some practice, but it's even easier if someone provides assistance. For example, roasters' coffee descriptions can help. If coffees are precisely described as having the taste of a fruit or sweet, we can try to taste that attribute. It would be brilliant if the description always matched the sensation.
Smelling and tasting are highly individual and largely depend on what we already know. In this respect, it is worthwhile to describe coffees not only by their aroma but also by how they feel. Because that's where the strength of all of us comes through: we usually feel better than we smell and taste. But we are not really aware of this because we don't focus on it all the time. However, feeling is something innate to us. We can feel what is soft or rough without having known it before. But we cannot recognize green apple acidity if we have never eaten a green apple.
Feeling the coffee
The consistency of coffee significantly influences our perception. If a coffee has a syrupy consistency and lingers longer on the tongue, we also have more time to analyze the coffee. The flavors appear more intense.
If, however, a watery coffee quickly disappears from the tongue, there are fewer dissolved solids in it. The low intensity and short dwell time mean that the flavors are insufficiently perceptible. The element that is therefore crucial for the quality of a coffee and its readability is the body and the mouthfeel/texture.
The mouthfeel
The quality of the mouthfeel plays an important role in the sensory evaluation of a coffee. Even if the coffee has great aromas and complex acids - if the mouthfeel is not good, the coffee remains less enjoyable and the flavors are less readable.
"Mouthfeel" is the multifaceted, haptic sensory impression of a food. With the tongue, and less with the palate, we explore the consistency of food or liquids. The term "Mouthfeel" is a somewhat unfortunate loan translation of the English word mouthfeel. The texture often used in wine sensory analysis describes the same effect as mouthfeel and can easily replace it.
The differences in haptic sensory impressions between crispbread, oysters, and dough are enormous. The vocabulary to describe these differences is also very broad: crispy, slimy, chewy, etc.
With coffee, it's different. Coffee as a beverage is liquid, so the broad spectrum of intensity is limited: thin – liquid – viscous. Instead of broadening, we need to go deeper here and describe the quality of intensity to communicate coffee. From tea-like, silky, velvety, juicy, to round, creamy, syrupy, etc., we have a wide range of descriptions available.
For example, on Counter Culture Coffee's Flavor Wheel:
The body / weight
The body of a coffee gives us an impression of how heavy or light a coffee can be. Especially in sensory courses, I have repeatedly noticed how difficult it can be to describe the “body” of a liquid substance. It is somewhat abstract to bring together various, seemingly unrelated concepts, and then to do so with coffee, which we want to drink, not just look at.
However, if we translate body as weight, it helps many to grasp the concept more easily. This allows us to use familiar words like light or heavy to describe the haptic qualities of coffee.
On Counter Culture Coffee's Flavor Wheel, the weight of the coffee is broken down into three levels. This is simplified and sufficient for coffee analysis.
The weight x The mouthfeel
If we now combine both concepts, it enables us to precisely, yet simply and understandably, describe coffees.
- So we can have a light (weight) coffee that is round and silky (mouthfeel).
- Or we drink a heavy (weight) coffee that is syrupy and creamy (mouthfeel).
We combine two different categories, use familiar words, and describe simply but precisely how a coffee can feel. What exactly is light, medium, and heavy, and what distinguishes a silky texture from a velvety one, takes practice – and you get this primarily through exchange with others who drink and evaluate the same coffee.
Why is mouthfeel a quality indicator?
The mouthfeel of good coffee differs greatly from mediocre coffee, and even more so from lower quality coffee. Several factors are responsible for this, but mainly one: the ripeness and uniformity of the coffee cherries. Riper coffee cherries indicate by their color that the seed (the future coffee bean) has fully matured, received the necessary nutrients, and is ready for harvest. The color of the cherry is comparable to a traffic light system - only here, the red color is extremely positive.
Seeds from riper cherries have a softer texture because they are fully developed. Seeds from unripe cherries are harsher because they lack the necessary sweetness.
The type of roast can either capitalize on this initial state or destroy it. Shorter roasts preserve the existing texture and can even accentuate it with an extended Maillard phase. In contrast, longer roasts, which often have a baked character, increasingly reduce the texture, literally hollowing it out. We then often describe the mouthfeel as empty and hollow – even though the weight of the roast might still be heavy due to high solubility.
