How to Taste Coffee
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It might seem like splitting hairs to differentiate between tasting coffee and coffee tasting, but read on. It's worth it. Understanding what tasting coffee is and its essential place in the brewing process is crucial to brewing great coffee at home.
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Coffee tasting and tasting coffee have very different motives. Coffee tasting is about exploring the wonderful world of coffee flavours. Like wine tasting, it lets you discover what you enjoy and helps you decide what to buy. Having bought your beans, tasting coffee is the key to how to brew them. Discovering some beans you love is one thing. Tasting as you brew is what unlocks their full potential and turns them into a delicious cup of coffee.
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Tasting coffee is about refining your brewing. It's sampling your brew and asking whether it is too bitter, too sour, or too weak? It is a practical, deliberate step in the brewing process and a key to consistently great results. By tasting your coffee, you can make informed decisions about adjusting your grind size, recipe, and ratio, so as to remove harsh flavours, bring out balance and sweetness and release the coffee's full potential to brew a delicious cup of coffee.
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Intentionally tasting your coffee to see if it's too bitter, too sour, or too weak is essential to refining your brewing and crucial to achieving consistent, high-quality results. By carefully tasting and interpreting what's found, tasting coffee enables informed adjustments to grind size, recipe, ratio, and temperature to remove harsh notes and enhance balance and sweetness, releasing the coffee's full potential and brewing a delicious cup.
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Tasting Coffee vs Coffee Tasting
How to taste coffee
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To ask a question about how you taste coffee invites a reply about first putting it in your mouth, and if you really want to be advanced, noticing the coffee aromas first. However, once you've got a mouthful of coffee, what then?
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Usually, we can tell quite quickly whether a cup of coffee is enjoyable or not. Most of us have had the experience of buying a coffee that turns out to be disappointing. Hopefully, you’ve also had the opposite experience and bought a coffee, had a sip and discovered it's delicious. Tasting coffee is really about learning to recognise and understand what it is about the coffee that you like or dislike.
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How much you enjoy a coffee isn’t only determined by the coffee beans. The way the coffee is brewed can dramatically alter its flavour. The same beans, ground and brewed in different ways, can produce cups of coffee that taste remarkably different. For instance, if your coffee tastes thin and sour, it might be tempting to blame the beans. However, it’s more likely that the brew is under-extracted, meaning some of the beans’ natural bitterness and perhaps a little sweetness are missing. The result is an unbalanced, predominantly sour cup of coffee.
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If, when we taste coffee, we only ask whether we like it or not, without learning to recognise why, we risk missing out on brewing the best coffee the beans can offer. We might even end up throwing out good beans, unfairly blaming them for a bad brew, when the real issue lies in how they were brewed. What’s all too easy to forget is that even the best coffee beans can produce bad coffee if they’re badly brewed.
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Crucial Insight: Great beans, badly brewed, can still make an awful cup of coffee.
Tasting
Under
1) Acid - Sour and salty
2)Sweet
3) Bitter
Over
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PS Fines are bitter