The second of three notes written for friends getting into filter coffee — after the gear, before the brewing.

The best way to taste coffee is to “cup” the coffee, which is just adding hot water and some grinded beans to a bowl or cup, then actually just tasting it with a spoon to see what flavour the bean offers without any brewing technique.

The idea here is not to taste “correctly”, it’s just to get a feel for the characteristic of the bean. Character here is its taste profile. How sweet is the coffee? Or how sour is it? All of it is relative to other types of coffee that you have drank before.

How to cup

• First, use a ratio of 60g/kg of water, or 6g/100g of water.
• The grind size of your coffee doesn’t matter as much. Try to use clean and “soft” water at 95°.
• In a bowl, add your grinded coffee, then add your water in.
• Leave the coffee and the water until it’s cooled to room temp, which should take 4-5 minutes.
• Then use your spoon to just scoop out the oil, impurities and any floating coffee grinds from the top.

Tasting the cup

Tasting coffee can get really complicated. The “official” way is not something I have done before. The way I showed how to cup was more just to assess the flavour of the bean. I was not trying to judge the bean. I wanted to know how to best brew the bean, not judge whether the bean was “good” or “not”.

You can read more about how to officially cup coffee and rate them through this link.

The categories that I used and learnt from ONA are based off the same categories but just simplified. These are the categories:

Aroma (dry & wet) — this I think is just how “nice” the coffee smells when wet and dry. It’s to give you a sense of what you might be tasting. Although sometimes what you smell and what you taste can be completely different.

Flavour (first impressions, or sweetness is what I called it) — this is often referred to as sweetness but it’s generally the flavour of the coffee. Like Haven’s bean was considerably “flatter” than the others.

Acidity — to me, this is the “sourness” of the coffee. As in when it hits your tongue, does it remind you of the tartness of lemon? How harsh is that sourness?

Body — the texture of the coffee, or the official term is mouthfeel. As in, does it feel thick? Like syrup that it lingers in your mouth? Or is it like tea, it washes off pretty fast.

Balance — this is the combination of all of the above. You want a cup that has a pretty good balance I think. Although you may have a different preference. E.g. you might prefer more acidic coffees, or coffees that are “thicker” in mouthfeel.

For each cup of coffee, you want to be tasting for a specific category first. As in when you taste the coffee, focus on just one category at a time. If it helps, you can rate each category using a 1-10 scale.

The taste wheel

I find it helpful to think of colours when tasting. Like when you taste the cup, what colour immediately comes to mind? I know this was hard to do but I think it’s helpful as a start to describe what it is you are tasting. Colours were easy for me because if a coffee is sour, I think of lemon which is yellow, but it can get weird because sour also reminds me of plum skin which is purple. Colours are actually a common way to describe taste in coffee. I have also found it useful to describe whiskey and wine now, but you don’t see that often in those areas.

The one I use is the SCA Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel, which is the official one from the Specialty Coffee Association. You can also search “coffee tasting wheel” and get a whole lot of wheels out there. Because everyone’s palate is different, you might actually disagree with some of the colours there.

Like I think cherry should be a darker red, because when I think of cherry I think of the dark red, sweet but slightly tangy Tasmanian cherries. But the whole of Europe thinks of cherries as the cherry liquor in drinks, which is lighter and way sweeter than what I think of.

How to use the wheel

When you taste coffee, either through cupping or just a regular cup of coffee, start with the most generic colour you can think of. Start your way from the inside of the wheel to the outside.

If I drink a cup and it’s quite acidic, I might think “red” (fruity on the wheel). Then I drink again to find a more nuanced understanding of what kind of red it is. It’s not a “berry” kind of sour but more like a pineapple kind of tartness, when that acidity is a bit sharper on the tongue. Then I drink again, only to find out it’s actually quite sour but that juicy, mouth watering kind of sour which is actually like a “green apple”.

If you follow the wheel, it went from fruity red → maybe berry but I knew it didn’t remind me of berry → yellow (I was thinking pineapple) → green (because I decided that it reminded me of green apple).

The concept is just to start generic and then start to drill down into a more nuanced type.

The taste profile game

One way to get better at tasting is to see if you can find the “original” flavour of the bean. As in, when roasters make their beans, what did they intend for drinkers to find in their bean? This isn’t a hard rule because their tasting palette and conditions are different from yours. The general idea is to see if what you’re tasting in the bean reflects the roaster’s intention. This is commonly and pompously referred to as the “expression of the cup”.

Normally, roasters would put descriptions about the most unique thing they find in their cup. It’s normally what describes the acidity, aftertaste, and aroma. But they can also put descriptions in for the rest of the cupping categories. Lazy or cheaper roasters tend to put more generic terms when they just want it to look good on their bean but don’t put the effort in to describe their bean. It might also mean they aren’t very proud of the bean and just want to sell it for a profit.

Terms like “chocolatey”, “fruity”, “nutty” are all vague words that tell you the roaster hasn’t put in the effort to truly understand the bean. Generally, but not always, these are signs that the bean isn’t good, or that it isn’t the priority for the roaster.

To play this game, cup the coffee and start describing the taste using colours and see if you can pull out the distinctive elements of the bean. Like if you notice that the acidity in the bean stands out, what kind of acidity is it? Can you follow a colour path to get to what kind of acidity it is? Normally, a bean would have 2-3 distinctive notes that you can pick up.

Once you’ve made up your mind on the notes of the coffee, compare it against the roaster’s — but again, keep in mind that it might be different. It’s just good to see if you can taste what the roaster wanted drinkers to taste in the cup.

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Now the brewing: 4 by 6 V60 Method.