Describing coffees sensorially is similar to elite sports. You train your reading, expand your repertoire, and become faster at identifying individual flavor notes. But not everyone does this, let alone wants to. Certainly not the majority of consumers. A case for describing body and mouthfeel.
Cuppings, the professional coffee tastings where people slurp, study, and describe, are a multi-layered and partly creative process.
You meet people from various backgrounds, each bringing their own vocabulary for describing coffees. And if we're honest, most of us have a favorite description for certain taste triggers or flavor notes in coffee.
After the cupping, we collect these descriptions, compare, and discuss them. A catalog of descriptions emerges, from which we select the most useful ones to share. But if these are descriptions like green apple acidity, salted caramel, and ripe red grapes, most consumers will simply shake their heads and describe the same coffee as "different, special, and unfamiliar" instead.
Specialty coffee rarely appeals to consumers at first taste. Specialty coffee needs time for communication. Or a focus on body.
Mouthfeel vs. Flavor Notes
If someone has never tasted salted caramel, how can they decipher it in such a complex product as coffee? Or have you ever recognized a stranger on the street that you'd never met before?
Flavor notes are harder to describe than sensory impressions. We all feel these in different intensities. Body and mouthfeel (see also href="/en/blogs/kaffeewissen/mundgefuehl"article on mouthfeelhref="/en/blogs/kaffeewissen/mundgefuehl") often differ dramatically between individual coffees and serve as an indicator of quality. The mouthfeel of good coffee differs significantly from mediocre coffee, and even more from lower quality coffee.
I like to draw coffee drinkers' attention to the mouthfeel, weight, and creaminess of the coffee when drinking. We shouldn't forget that not everyone does this automatically. Then you can discuss whether the feel is more like the consistency of tea or rather more like the consistency of honey.
Describing the body of a coffee is usually easier for consumers than being creative about flavor notes.
A fellow judge once said I was a "body fetishist" because I put so much emphasis on describing coffee's body. But I'm convinced that a fitting description of mouthfeel can appeal to more people than creative descriptions of flavor notes.
