Hello there! This is Aleks for yet another Sunday brew of thought tickle on our favourite pass-time activity, coffee!
This time I will try to narrow-down the meaning of the flavours and taste notes that commercial specialty coffee has. As complex of a structure the coffee is, almost the same can be said for its flavours. There are tons of attributes that impact them and almost zero reasons why you should care about them.
Let's first do some intro.
Coffee cupping, or coffee tasting, is the practice of identifying distinctive flavour components in a brewed coffee. This practice is used to evaluate beans and roasts, troubleshoot brewing problems, and identify sources of flavour defects. Coffee cupping is often linked to wine-tasting. It helps professionals determine the grades of quality, define the potential for combinations (so that the right or desired blend is achieved) and open discussion over the advertisable qualities of the coffee, which in most cases is the most important attribute, at least from commercial point of view.
One does not discuss tastes, as some would say. Especially when it comes to something as complex as coffee. But why the old saying (De gustibus non est disputandum) is correct, is because taste as a sensation is influenced a lot by circumstances. The last food we had, hormones, memories from childhood, and whatnot. One's vanilla is somebody else's white chocolate. There is a reason why I don't like to drink coffee soon after I brush my teeth. My taste receptors are influenced by the mint in the toothpaste and to me, a coffee after brushing my teeth tastes like mold.
Autosuggestion or mental state in general also has a lot to do with how we perceive tastes. Often, things resembling a taste are being labeled as the taste itself, and our mind is ok with believing that. The way this works, at a high level, is by introducing a word to the brain, like Blueberry, which is converted to image (the way we perceive Blueberries) which is converted to all our experiences around it. Tastes, looks, shapes, events. We put our mind in a state of all of it just by reading 'Blueberry' somewhere. Mind is easy to trick.
Another aspect by unintentional influence of taste is something I briefly mentioned in my French press post —carbonation and its influence on how we perceive taste. Sometimes things do not taste as we feel them in our mouth, as we somehow introduced an imbalance to the way the mind receives these tastes. A small example is the case with the CO2 from the foam that forms during a french press brew, as a source of carbonation (now scientifically explained).
Ok, so how about flavours?
Usually there are few packs of different blends of specialty coffee at my home and on almost all of them there is a specification on their flavours and taste notes. I got really curious about where all of them come from. What does "Vanilla, Chocolate, Brown-sugar" actually mean? Can it be all of them? Are any of these flavours tweaked or introduced somehow during the drying or the roasting phase? I asked some baristas that are part of the online coffee community.
The answer I received was a bit surprising to me as it held a low level of importance about this very obvious label on our coffee packs. Almost all of them answered in a similar way: the flavour labels on the coffee are meant to indicate what the roaster experienced when they tasted the coffee. Usually, they say, this happens after a series of cupping but overall the taste notes serve as a bookmark to whatever the professionals want to remember in the post-cupping phase.
After the harvest, hundreds of cuppings a day is a very common practice for coffee professionals. The characteristic notes are used to help these professionals remember what they liked about the coffee. Interestingly enough, these flavours do not affect the score of the coffee in any way. It could be, as they say, quite the contrary. The more pronounced label of a flavour for a roast might suggest a marketing trap trying to create a fake value by putting "lemon pie, walnut pomade and dark chocolate" on the bag. In most cases, these notes are ignored in terms of establishing the score of the roast. And as such, flavour notes are usually given per roast, rather than per blend. That is why it often happens to read a series of taste notes on a particular blend, or, one would argue, as many flavour notes as there are roasts in that blend. So, it's not a flavoured coffee. These notes are just a reference and they don't mean anything was added to influence the coffee taste.
With all this said, the next time you read Caramel on your beans bag, remember: it's somebody else's Caramel. It could be that you, without biasing your brain by reading the flavour note, experience something completely different the very first time you try something new. Try that small experiment. Take notes, then compare.
Can the coffee flavours be tuned?
How can you take these tastes in your favor? Honestly I think you should not care about flavour notes, especially when you are dealing with a limited set of coffee blends. One just cannot say they prefer the vanilla taste of a specialty coffee. Given the fact that 3 different coffee cuppers can put 4 different flavour notes, for us at home, that means almost nothing.
Coffee is a collection of acids, sugars, some lipid compounds, and thousands of aromatics. If you can influence these parameters from the point of growing, drying, roasting and brewing, with lots of experience you might be able to tune them. There is a direct relation between how the cherry grows and how much of it actually gets roasted (meaning, burned during roasting, as a some form of a measure of loss), that determines the balance between the traits in the bean. And that’s it. Coffee’s taste notes are somebody’s good memories of a cupping session they had. Trust that, but don’t take it for granted.
Given a coffee with a caramel note, it does not mean it has ever been mixed with a caramel bean, but rather it could mean that the sweetness that is being perceived in your mouth resembles notes of the same sweetness notes caramel has.
The flavour note and label that you see on your coffee package, gives you an idea of what to expect from the coffee. And then, influence your suggestion to think that it's consuming the taste that is on that label.
For me personally it’s more important to know the acidity of the coffee together with the roast type (blonde or dark). These two parameters play major role in determining whether the blend is something I can enjoy or not. But who knows, all of this is being said by a person that does not like the taste of a chocolate for the most part.
Why would I like a dark chocolate labeled roast?