Top Tips for Improving Your Coffee Tasting Palate
Spiller & Tait customers often tell us it's the depth of flavour of our coffees that differentiates them compared to other coffee brands. To achieve this, all of our coffees, whether single origin or blended, are designed to be balanced, rich and lacking bitterness, while enhancing the subtle flavours inherent in the beans. These are taste qualities we know are highly valued by coffee drinkers.
Occasionally, we are asked for advice on how to approach the tasting of coffee so that the range of flavours in our drinks can be fully appreciated. This blog provides a summary of the tips we offer for opening up taste buds and expanding your palate to appreciate the taste of fresh coffee like an expert.
For professionals in the coffee trade, coffee tasting is a technical procedure called a Cupping. We don’t recommend you try to replicate Cupping at home. Without extensive training and specialist equipment, Cupping (which involves slurping black coffee from a spoon) can deliver such an intense flavour that most people find it overwhelms their palate and prevents them from discerning any subtlety in flavours.
Therefore, coffee connoisseurs intent on extracting full flavour from a coffee will use a pour-over method, like a V60 dripper or Chemex, because these brew methods tend to deliver a clean cup (see Cleanliness below), making it easier to discern the flavours in a black coffee. If you're new to this brewing method and want to give it a try, have a look at our guide to making pour-over coffee in a Chemex. However, our advice to customers is to start the taste appreciation process with their usual brew method, whether Cafetiere, Espresso or Aeropress and with or without milk, because this is likely to be a method that they have already mastered to maximise flavour. In our view, the brew method is secondary in enhancing flavour, when compared to the consistency of the grind, the cleanliness of the water and the fresh beans. So, using your usual brew method is the best place to start.
Taste isn't just about what you experience on your tongue. The perception of flavour comes from our body's chemosensation system, in which olfactory (smell) and gustatory (taste) inputs converge. While you naturally use your sense of smell when you drink, we recommend actually pausing to smell your coffee and to do this at a few specific moments in the coffee making process:
Each of these steps will smell slightly different. But, collectively, they are warming up your chemosensation system so that you are able to discern the full flavour of the coffee when you finally come to drink.
There is a sipping sequence coffee experts follow to assess flavours in a cup. After inhaling the aroma, they start with a tiny sip, followed by a more extended slurp into the mouth, aerating the coffee as it travels across the entire surface of the tongue. This is followed by another tiny sip. Like the smelling sequence described above, these sipping steps help to wake up your brain to the full range of flavours. Experts also keep their eyes closed, in an effort to focus their tongue while specifically searching for the following taste characteristics:
In the end, taste is highly personal. But, by starting to think more about what you're drinking and following the expert steps, you should be able to identify what types of coffee you really enjoy most. This can change over time, just as your tastes for wine, beer and other beverages naturally changes.
When evaluating the quality of a roast, there are a few things experts look for, especially in coffees that are rare, exotic, or expensive:
If all of this seems complicated, don’t worry. Your morning cup gives you an opportunity each day to develop your palate, which will become more discerning as you give the tasting process more attention. But, you can help things along by having a basis for comparison, so brew a couple of different coffees and taste them with friends. Our Taster Packs are perfect for this, but you can do it with any coffee. You could even compare fresh coffee with not-so-fresh coffee, though you can probably guess what the results will be. Consider it an interesting experiment to see which flavours you and your friends agree on, and which, perhaps, only you seem to pick up on.
Another interesting comparison is to taste some single origin coffees from different regions of the world, to see how regional differences in growing conditions have a significant impact on the flavour of coffee beans. Our Coffees of The World Collection is ideal for this purpose.
We hope you enjoy the journey of tasting coffee like an expert!
Comments will be approved before showing up.