Tasting Coffee

Ok. You get that we like coffee. But here’s one side I really want to show off: tasting.  Not just drinking. But tapping into your sense of smell, taste and touch to describe a particular coffee.  It’s a bit humorous to watch if its your first time, and makes you feel a bit awkward, like when your friend the wine snob sticks their nose into their glass for a full minute with their eyes shut.  Welcome to what we call: ‘geeking out’.  Once you get the hang of it, you’ll realize its just a playground for passion.

There’s a reason why you have to close your eyes.  It’s because there are over 850 different identified aroma and flavor compounds in coffee. That’s 200 more than dark chocolate and 350 more than wine!* I must say its an incredibly culinary-like past time. To learn, one must practice.  Luckily, we have been granted with 20 million smell detectors, and memory is most connected to this particular sense.  To train, one must eat, drink, and smell with mindfulness during daily life.

It has become a habit of ours to discuss our meals, wine flights and the large assortment of dark chocolates we have in the house.  (Christmas treated us well).  While in Hawaii, I was able to play this game called: le nez du café (or make scents of coffee) – in the image above. Jean Lenoir** created this aroma kit to help train a person’s ability to identify the most common aromas in coffee.  These words are used in formal evaluations throughout the industry, and thus creates a common vocabulary for experts to discuss a cups positive and negative attributes.  This language is used in almost every stage from sourcing green beans, to roasting, to choosing a specific coffee for a cafe or retail store.  It really is a lot of fun, and it adds a lot to your coffee experience knowing the words to describe what you are tasting and smelling.  So get out and smell……everything!!….not just the flowers.

Although my favorite aroma below is that of the Coffee Blossom.  I hope you all get a chance to smell that one day too.

The 36 aromas in the kit include:

1. Earth
2. Potato
3. Garden peas
4. Cucumber
5. Straw
6. Cedar
7. Clove-like
8. Pepper
9. Coriander seeds
10. Vanilla
11. Tea-roses/Redcurrant jelly
12. Coffee blossom
13. Coffee pulp
14. Blackcurrant-like
15. Lemon
16. Apricot
17. Apple
18. Butter
19. Honeyed
20. Leather
21. Basmati Rice
22. Toast
23. Malt
24. Maple Syrup
25. Caramel
26. Dark chocolate
27. Roasted almonds
28. Roasted peanuts
29. Roasted hazelnuts
30. Walnuts
31. Cooked beef
32. Smoke
33. Pipe Tobacco
34. Roasted coffee
35. Medicinal
36. Rubber.

*Some dark chocolate and wine sites claim that these numbers are much higher. According to coffee research, however, coffee does beat these two other amazing consumables out. It is likely these numbers grow through research over the years.

**Jean Lenoir originally created the le nez du vin (Wine Aroma Kits).  It was his intention to expose coffee’s depth and intricacy as a beverage, and very much deserving of the same attention as wine.

Sources:

 

The Complexity of Coffee: Aroma Profiling Isn’t Just for Wine: http://blog.coffeereview.com/uncategorized/the-complexity-of-coffee-aroma-profiling-isnt-just-for-wine-3/ 

The Nose, an Emotional Time Machine: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/05/science/05angier.html