"Strong and weak", "mild and bitter" are probably the most commonly heard pairs of opposites that coffee drinkers use to describe their coffee. Some coffee experts consider these terms useless. Unfortunately, that's not quite right and is rather elitist.
In recent years, coffee farmers, importers, roasters, baristas, bloggers, gastronomes, scientists and others have made the specialty coffee industry more colorful, but also more confusing for the uninitiated. We're getting more coffee variety, more stories, and more individual expressions of beverages.
Questions that every café with quality aspirations must ask itself today are:
- How do we communicate all the knowledge we've gained to average coffee drinkers?
- What descriptions do we use?
- What coffee serves as our reference to make the differences clear?
- How do we avoid overwhelming consumers in the process?
Here's a mini-explanation model that won't overwhelm consumers but should still spark their curiosity about more background information – if they want it
Strong and weak coffee
The majority of coffee drinkers define coffee by its intensity. The natural reaction of coffee professionals would probably be: "But which intensity?" A fair question, since we know that acidity, sweetness, body, etc. are examined not just for intensity but also for quality.
So does it make sense if I explain to a coffee drinker the differences between quality and intensity, knowing full well that this causes confusion even among coffee professionals again and again?
Let's engage with this intensity discussion. The statement "this coffee is strong (or weak)" is not nearly as one-dimensional as it sounds. You can answer this statement clearly with "yes" or "no" and then elaborate immediately, because: there are at least three reasons why the coffee might be strong/weak:
- Ratio of coffee to water (recipe)
- Agitation, time, temperature, pressure (brewing method)
- Solubility of the coffee (roast)
Now we have three topics (recipe, brewing method, roast) as a starting point for engaging the consumer in a deeper conversation about quality.
Mild and bitter
"Mild" and "bitter" are probably the second most common descriptions for coffee. In sensory training sessions, I always ask participants what they understand by "mild". Answers like these are typical: "fine aromas, fine flavors, nothing disturbing, no acidity, harmonious." When asked what the opposite of mild is, the most common answer given is: "bitter".
How do we deal with this?
We have some imprecise descriptions, but also a helpful pair of opposites: bitter – mild.
To illustrate this, we typically conduct an experiment with an optimally extracted filter coffee A (TDS approx. 1.25, extraction rate approx. 20%), and an over-extracted filter coffee B (TDS approx. 1.25, extraction rate approx. 25%). So far, most participants like coffee A, which is "mild and harmonious". Coffee B is by comparison "bitter", "unbalanced" or even "aggressive".
If we expand our Y-axis with an X-axis, we get the following simple diagram that anyone can understand and follow with a bit of explanation:
At this point, we haven't gotten too technical yet – we've described the coffee neither lexically (variety, origin, processing) nor in terms of content (flavor notes, body, acidity, etc.). And yet we were able to communicate more information – information that includes rather than excludes the average coffee drinker.
We don't need to reinvent sensory communication. We advocate approaching consumers with the terminology they use, but defining it more precisely. And suddenly "weak" and "strong" become a complex matter.
