When we describe coffees, it's about more than just identifying aromas and flavor notes. Particularly 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 coffees sensorially is something delightful. It's fun to identify aromas, classify them, and immerse yourself in the coffee. It's a multifaceted, partly creative process. When you taste coffees with others, it becomes even more colorful - people with the most diverse backgrounds, each bringing their own vocabulary for describing coffees, exchange thoughts about the same coffee.
This creates a catalog of descriptions, from which we can absorb and store the most useful ones. At the next tasting, we can recall these exact descriptions and continually expand our catalog. Various protocols allow us to document this in writing as well.
On smelling, tasting, and feeling
Especially in tastings with others, it usually 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 more as "different, special, and unfamiliar." But for coffee people, that's exactly where the incentive can lie to describe a coffee's aromatics more precisely.
Now, 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 similarities of caramel in a coffee. This takes some practice, but it's even easier if someone helps us along the way. 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 great if the description always matched the perception.
Smelling and tasting is highly individual and depends to a large extent on what we already know. In this regard, it's worth describing coffees not only by their aromatics, but also by how they feel. Because that's where all of our strengths come out: we usually feel better than we smell and taste. But we're not really conscious of this because we don't focus on it all the time. But: feeling is something innate to us. We can feel what is soft or rough without having known it before. 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. When 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.
When, on the other hand, a watery coffee quickly disappears from the tongue, there are fewer dissolved solids in it. The low intensity and its short retention time mean that the flavor notes are only barely perceptible. The element that is decisive here for the quality of a coffee and its readability is the body and the mouthfeel/texture.
The mouthfeel
The quality of the 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 is not good, the coffee remains less enjoyable and the flavor notes are less readable.
The "mouthfeel" is the multifaceted, haptic sensory impression of a food. With the tongue, and less with the palate, we explore the texture of food or liquids. The term "mouthfeel" is somewhat awkward loan translation from the English word mouthfeel. The texture, often used in wine tasting sensory analysis, describes the same effect as mouthfeel and can easily replace it.
The differences in haptic 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 and therefore the broad spectrum of intensity is limited: thin – liquid – thick. Instead of going broad, we need to go deep here and describe the quality of intensity to communicate coffee. From tea-like, silky, velvety, juicy, to smooth, 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 classes, 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, not just look at.
But if we translate body as weight, that helps many people grasp the concept more easily. That way, we can use long-familiar words like light or heavy to help describe the haptics of the coffee.
On the Flavor Wheel from Counter Culture Coffee, the weight of the coffee is broken down into three levels. That's reduced and sufficient for analyzing coffees.
The weight x The mouthfeel
When we now mix both concepts together, it enables us to provide a precise, yet simple and understandable description of coffees.
- So we can have a light (weight) coffee in front of us that is smooth and silky (mouthfeel).
- Or we drink a heavy (weight) coffee that is syrupy and creamy (mouthfeel).
We combine two different categories, use familiar words, and simply but precisely describe how a coffee can feel. What exactly is light, medium, and heavy, and what distinguishes a silky texture from a velvety one, takes practice - and you get this especially through exchange with others who drink and evaluate the same coffee.
Why is mouthfeel a quality indicator?
The mouthfeel of good coffee differs significantly from mediocre, and even more so from coffee of lower quality. Several factors are responsible for this, but primarily 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 ripe, has received the necessary nutrients, and is ready for harvest. The color of the cherry is comparable to a traffic light system - except that red here is extremely positive.
Seeds from riper cherries are softer in texture because they are fully ripe. Seeds from unripe cherries are harsher because they lack the necessary sweetness.
The type of roast can use this initial situation positively, or can render it useless. Shorter roasts retain the texture that already exists, and with an extended Maillard phase can even emphasize it somewhat. Conversely, longer roasts, which often have a baked character, increasingly reduce the texture and virtually hollow it out. We then often describe the mouthfeel as empty and hollow - even though the weight from the high solubility of the roast can still be heavy.
