What is the taste often mentioned in coffee?

Taste is a flavor that we experience through touch. The hand is the most sensitive part of the body, followed by the lips and tongue. Our mouths are covered with nerve endings that respond to the density, viscosity, cold and heat of food and drink. The unique tactile feeling of coffee is usually an important factor in determining its quality, that is, the mellow thickness and astringency of coffee. Taste is tactile. What is mellow thickness?

Let's start with the basics: alcohol thickness is the structure and texture of coffee. In The Professional Barista's Handbook, Scott Rao defines alcohol thickness as "the weight or plumpness of the drink you feel in your mouth."

Since the thickness of alcohol is an element of taste, you can know that there will be differences. In The Coffee Dictionary's book, Maxwell writes, "imagine that it would be interesting when you can feel light but sticky coffee, or full-bodied coffee with a juicy taste." Alcohol thickness is not what we taste, but what we feel. However, this can affect the overall flavor of coffee, because the flavor is a combination of many elements-such as taste, aroma, texture, and even sound and vision.

In the author's experience as a barista, alcohol thickness is one of the three elements pursued by coffee drinkers (the other two are bright acidity and clear flavor).

Fat must be an important indicator that can not be avoided. In addition to giving espresso important look-and-feel characteristics, oil also changes the flavor and taste of espresso to some extent. But what is grease actually? have you thought about this question?

Literally, oil is the golden to chocolate liquid just extracted from the upper layer of espresso, which is inextricably linked to the "pressure" itself. after the extraction is completed, the lighter color of the oil floats on the upper layer. the darker coffee liquid will stand still in the lower layer.

Concentrated oil is a mixture of many substances: water extracts the soluble substances in the coffee powder layer under heating and pressurization, which emulsifies the natural fat and oil in the coffee and mixes the air to form some tiny and fine bubbles. At the same time, because the roasted fresh coffee itself releases a certain amount of carbon dioxide, these gases will also participate in the above-mentioned emulsification reaction; the more freshly roasted coffee, the more carbon dioxide it emits. so we can also see large bubbles gushing out during the extraction process.

On the one hand, oil reflects the status of raw coffee beans, the more oil, the more natural oil content of coffee beans, which is also related to the handling of raw beans; at the same time, it also reflects the roasting degree and freshness of coffee beans. Of course, some people think that concentrated fat tastes good, but this is not absolutely true-Luodou's fat, for example, is beautiful.

Acidity (acid)

Coffee needs elegant and attractive acid to have a higher score, including that coffee itself contains a lot of organic acids (chlorogenic acid, malic acid, citric acid, gluconic acid, etc.).

At the same time, a large number of fruity alcohols, esters, aldehydes and ketones, all of which give coffee special acidity with fruit flavor.

So coffee more or less contains sour substances, and after all, it's a berry.

What makes coffee acidity?

Acidity is the most important item in coffee tasting.

Acidity, which is usually used to describe the flavor of coffee, describes a lively, fresh, refreshing feeling, similar to the taste of wine, with a strong and exciting texture, and sometimes called brightness.

Without acidity, coffee tastes empty and boring, just like it has no vitality.

Fresh coffee beans contain a variety of organic chemicals that make up the unique taste of coffee. One of them is chlorogenic acid, which gradually decomposes in the baking process, producing a large number of aromatic substances. What's the aroma?

Like many plants, more than 60% of the substances in raw coffee beans are carbohydrates, the fat content is about 10-15%, while the protein content is less than 10%, which is somewhat different from other plants, which should be regarded as caffeine, chlorogenic acid, fenugreek base and so on.

But no matter how hard you put your heart into each step, from seed to cup, planting, baking, extraction, the total amount of soluble matter in a cup of coffee will not exceed 2%.

But the funny thing is, normally, as long as the organic acid content in a cup of coffee reaches 0.4%, people can easily and obviously feel the acidity of the coffee. The proportion of organic acids in coffee can easily exceed 0.4%, but other ingredients in coffee can be masked, making it impossible to feel more.

In fact, people's sense of taste, apart from the discussion of smell, can only be perceived as sour, sweet, bitter, salty and fresh, while 0.01% of the ingredients in a cup of coffee are enough to make people feel bitter, and 0.1% is enough to make us aware of sour taste.