When we describe coffees, it's about more than just identifying aromas and flavor notes. In particular, the two categories of body and texture, where we feel rather than taste, help us understand coffee even better and recognize truly good quality.
Describing coffee sensorially is something pleasurable. It's fun to identify aromas, categorize them, and immerse yourself in the coffee. It's a multi-layered, partly creative process. When you taste coffees with others, it becomes even more diverse – people with very different backgrounds who also bring different vocabulary for describing coffees exchange their thoughts about the same coffee.
This creates a catalog of descriptions, from which we can take and store the most useful ones for us. At the next tasting, we can remember these descriptions and continuously expand our catalog. Various protocols allow us to document this in writing as well.
About smelling, tasting, and feeling
Especially in tastings with others, it often becomes apparent how differently coffees can be described in terms of aromas and flavor notes. When people talk about green apple acidity, salted caramel, and ripe red grapes, most consumers would probably shake their heads and describe the same coffee as "different, special, and unfamiliar." But for coffee people, that's exactly where the incentive can lie to describe a coffee's aromatics ever more precisely.
However, precise descriptions of aromatics are always associations with things we already know. We can only recognize smells and flavor notes in coffee that we already know.
We must first know caramel, and then try to find the similarities of caramel in a coffee. That takes some practice, but it's even easier if someone guides you. For example, coffee descriptions from roasteries help. When coffees are precisely described by a fruit or sweetness, we can try to taste out that attribute. It would be ideal if the description always matched the sensation.
Smelling and tasting are highly individual and depend largely on what we already know. In that sense, it's worth describing coffees not only by their aromatics, but also by how they feel. Because that's where the strength of all of us comes through: we usually feel better than we smell and taste. But we're not really aware of this because we don't concentrate on it all the time. However, feeling is something that's innate to us. We can feel what's soft or rough without knowing it beforehand. But we can't recognize green apple acidity if we've never eaten a green apple.
Feeling the coffee
The texture of the coffee significantly influences our perception. If a coffee has a syrupy consistency and lingers longer on the tongue, we also have more time to analyze the coffee. The flavor notes (flavours) appear more intense to us.
Conversely, if a watery coffee quickly disappears from the tongue, it contains fewer dissolved solids. The low intensity and its short retention time mean that the flavor notes are barely perceptible. The element that is crucial here for the quality of a coffee and its readability is the body and the mouthfeel/texture.
The mouthfeel / mouthfeel
The quality of mouthfeel plays an important role in the sensory evaluation of a coffee. Even if the coffee has great aromas and complex acids – if the mouthfeel isn't good, the coffee remains less enjoyable and the flavor notes are less readable.
The "mouthfeel" is the multi-layered, tactile sensory impression of a food. With the tongue, and less with the palate, we explore the texture of foods or liquids. The term "mouthfeel" is a somewhat awkward loan translation from the English word mouthfeel. The texture often used in wine sensory analysis describes the same effect as mouthfeel and can easily be used in its place.
The differences in tactile sensory impressions between crispbread, oysters, and dough are enormous. The vocabulary to describe these differences is also very broad: crispy, slippery, chewy, etc.
With coffee, it's different. Coffee as a beverage is liquid, so the broad spectrum of intensity is limited: thin-bodied – liquid – thick-bodied. Instead of going broad, we need to go deep here and describe the quality of the intensity to communicate coffee. From tea-like, silky, velvety, juicy, to round, creamy, syrupy, etc., we have a large palette of descriptions at our disposal.
For example, on the Flavor Wheel from Counter Culture Coffee:
The body / body, the weight
The body of a coffee gives us an impression of how heavy or light a coffee can be. Especially in sensory courses, I've repeatedly noticed how difficult it can be to describe the "body" of a liquid substance. It's somewhat abstract to bring together different, seemingly unrelated concepts, and then do it with coffee, which we want to drink and not just look at.
If we translate body as weight, however, that helps many people grasp the concept more easily. This way, we can use familiar words like light or heavy to help us describe the tactile qualities of the coffee.
On the Flavor Wheel from Counter Culture Coffee, the weight of the coffee is broken down into three levels. This is reduced and sufficient for analyzing coffees.
The weight x The mouthfeel
If we now mix both concepts together, it enables us to give a precise, yet simple and understandable description of coffees.
- So we can have a light (weight) coffee in front of us that's round and silky (mouthfeel).
- Or we drink a heavy (weight) coffee that's syrupy and creamy (mouthfeel).
We combine two different categories, use familiar words, and describe simply but precisely how a coffee can feel. What exactly constitutes light, medium, and heavy, and what distinguishes a silky texture from a velvety one, requires practice – and you'll get this especially through exchange with others who are drinking and evaluating the same coffee.
Why is mouthfeel a quality indicator?
The mouthfeel of good coffee differs significantly from average coffee, and even more so from coffee of lower quality. Several factors are responsible for this, but mainly one: the ripeness and uniformity of the coffee cherries. Riper coffee cherries indicate by their color that the seed (the future coffee bean) is fully ripened, has received the necessary nutrients, and is ready for harvest. The color of the cherry is comparable to a traffic light system – except here the red color is extremely positive.
Seeds from riper cherries are softer in texture because they're fully ripened. Seeds from unripe cherries are harsher because they lack the necessary sweetness.
The roasting method can take advantage of this starting point positively or render it ineffective. Shorter roasts preserve the already existing texture and can even emphasize it somewhat with an extended Maillard phase. Conversely, longer roasts, which often have a baked character, increasingly reduce the texture and essentially hollow it out. We then often describe the mouthfeel as empty and hollow – even though the weight can still be heavy due to the high solubility of the roast.
