How To Properly Taste Coffee

Chances are you’ve had coffee—64 percent of Americans drink at least a cup a day—but do you know how to really taste your coffee? To understand the flavors of the particular brew you’ve chosen? Like a fine wine tasting, there is a way to taste coffee properly.

Use All Your Senses

Start by getting yourself a cup of coffee made up from the best coffee bean roaster but skip the cream or sugar as this will mask the flavors you’re trying to isolate. Bring the cup to your nose and breathe in slowly. Make sure that you feel the fragrance going all the way to the back of your nasal cavity until it reaches your throat.

Slowly exhale with your mouth slightly open to prepare your palate for the flavors that it will experience during the initial smell test. See what flavors you can decipher with your sense of smell alone, and then take a sip. 

Savor The Flavor

Let the coffee swish around in your mouth. Wait until it has sunk into your taste buds and try to determine the sweetness, bitterness, and even hints of salt or acidity. As a reference, you’ll typically taste sweetness at the front of your tongue and bitterness at the back. Salty flavors are picked up slightly behind sweetness, and acidity is behind the salty receptors but in front of the bitter receptors. The two flavors that good coffee should light up the most are sweetness and acidity. For more information about great coffee brewers, visit Greatcoffeebrewers.com site.

Once you’ve introduced the coffee to your palate, take another slurp to get a full experience of how it tastes. Determine how it feels in your mouth (the body)by how heavy or light it feels. See if the flavors linger or fizzle out quickly and if the aftertaste is something pleasant or kind of muddy and bland. 

During your tasting experiments at this barista training course, keep searching for different flavors as the coffee begins to cool down and more flavors become noticeable. Drink water to cleanse your palate so that you know if what you are tasting is from your current drink. Eating some bread or anything that will absorb the taste in addition to drinking water is very important if you are tasting multiple types of coffee.

Experiment With Different Roasts And Bean Types

If you are an everyday coffee drinker, test coffees from Happy Coffee to see what flavor suits you best. Determining what farm or even the area the coffee originates from is pretty much impossible, but each one will have some difference in its body feel and flavor that will speak to your taste buds the best. 

Now that you understand how to taste coffee properly, you can work on elevating that every-infamous break room brew—your co-workers will definitely thank you. There are also corporate coffee systems that do all of the hard work of tasting and preparation for you if you feel a little lost, but otherwise, enjoy your search!