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Coffee 101: more than just caffeine

Coffee 101: more than just caffeine

  • 22 November, 2020
  • Osvaldo Pena

Welcome to the very first STUPiD GOOd Cafe blog post!  If you're here and you're reading this we want to thank you and assure you of 3 things:  

  1. It won't be a waste of time
  2. at some point throughout this blog post, you will definitely laugh 
  3. you will definitely learn something you hadn't thought about throughout all your years consuming this wonderful beverage known as coffee :)

For most of us this thing called life consists of a pretty predictable routine.  From the time we're kids, we're taught to wake up, brush our teeth, get dressed, grab something to eat and then head off to our respective responsibilities.  Our respective responsibilities evolve as we grow older and reach various stages of maturity.  Depending on the individual, these stages of maturity happen at completely unpredictable times throughout our lives.  Since this blog is supposed to be about coffee, I want to focus your attention on that time in your life where you reached the maturity level necessary to begin consuming this wonderful beverage.  Do you remember your first thoughts, reactions, perceptions of taste when you tried it for the first time?  Most of us remember needing to disguise coffees taste with sweeteners and milk.  Perhaps we weren't aware we were disguising it at all, and through some unconscious social bias, we simply believed that adding milk and sugar were the 'right' way to consume coffee.  

Welcome to "Coffee 101:  More than just caffeine" where I hope to expand your knowledge of what you thought you already knew about coffee.  This is the first blog post in a series that will be discussing all the different characteristics behind coffee and what is actually happening on your palette as you take every sip.  We already know what's happening behind the scenes and why we continue to come back for more day in and day out.  The honorable Rick James once said "Cocaine is a hell of a drug!"...I think it's safe to say we can also add Caffeine to that statement!!  

So how do we 'taste' coffee?  The first thing you want to have is a few genres of flavor to think through while tasting.  The following categories provide some context and structure, but please try and work through them one at a time. Just like wine tasting, with coffee there's aroma, acidity, body, mouthfeel, and balance to think about as well, but we won't be covering those in this first post.  The following 4 categories will be a great starting point for understanding what your tongue is trying to tell your brain.

  • Fruit: Fruit flavors are some of the most commonly found tasting notes in specialty coffee; we can thank coffee’s acidity for this fun (and perhaps unexpected) experience. If your palate is sending your brain signals like bright, tart, mouthwatering, or even sour, you’re likely experiencing a fruit flavor.  Q: But how will I know or how can I tell when my palate is sending my brain those signals?  A: It's really easy, take a really slow sip of any liquid and concentrate on the sides of your tongue.  Highly acidic beverages will cause the sides of your tongue to secrete noticeable amounts of saliva while low acidic beverages will be almost seamless.  We will explore this further in next weeks post.  

  • Sweet: Sweetness in coffee won’t always come across the way that people often think of sweet and sugary confections. Because of the caramelization process that occurs during roasting, sweetness will often be perceived as browned sugars or “dark” sweetness—think honey, maple syrup, or caramel.  Truth be told, this is one of the more difficult things to taste when it comes to coffee and one of the best ways to test for it is to line up 3 to 4 coffees based on acidity and sweetness profiles and taste them back to back.  You will notice that the coffees you perceived as sweet based on flavor profile descriptions won't necessarily contain the expected residual sugars from the caramelization process described above.  

  • Savory: Nutty, spiced, earthy, or even downright roasty, savory flavors oftentimes carry a lot of the load in coffee.  These flavors remind me of the 2 styles of wine we learn about when we go to a wine tasting.  Old world wines that contain those earthy aromas like mushroom, bell peppers, and anything else you can think of planting in your garden vs. new world wines where the aromas and flavors are jammy and extremely fruit forward.  Savory coffee can be wonderful, but this seems like a good time to remind you that not every flavor in every coffee will be delicious.

  • Bitter: Though “bitter” isn’t a flavor that coffee people often use to advertise their brews, it has to be said that coffee just wouldn’t be the same without it. In fact, caffeine itself is naturally bitter—so much so that caffeine solution is used as the basis for understanding bitterness in the Sensory Lexicon (that's this wheel we use in the sommelier world to try and make sense of all the crazy flavors we can often encounter in our favorite beverages). Bitterness brings balance to all of the other flavors in the cup; it can add layers of flavor like dark chocolate or cocoa nibs, or even round out fruit flavors like the bittering finish to a grapefruit or green grape.  

While everything we've described above may seem complex and confusing at first, that's because it is!  But rest assured, we've developed a STUPiD EASy approach to teaching you Coffee 101.  This first post was simply to introduce some of the flavor generes we want you all to become comfortable with before we begin to dive into the more complicated characteristics like acidity, aroma, balance, body, clarity, finish, and mouthfeel.  The end goal is to make the entire process less intimidating while helping you start to enjoy the road to becoming a more educated consumer who will be able to decipher premium quality coffee from a lot of the burnt crap you never knew you were consuming because you've been disguising with all sorts of aftermarket sweeteners and other stuff. 

We hope you enjoyed this post and we look forward to seeing you here again next week as we continue posting for the series "Coffee 101: More than just Caffeine" 

Wishing you all a STUPiD GOOd Thanksgiving week ahead! 

 

 

   

 

 

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