Coffee tasting | how important is smell to coffee tasting?

When tasting specialty coffee, we need to understand: training or memory for taste, improve our ability to distinguish. Coffee drinking is the result of a vision, smell and taste working together.

Train your senses. Many people tell you, just drink more. The truth is, drink, and constantly remember, which requires an accumulation process. The so-called accumulation process is also a bitter training process, throwing a lot of money, using a lot of time, the amount of change to achieve qualitative change.

Odors are volatile substances that cannot be touched or seen, but can only be felt. Memory of smells in the environment is an exercise that needs to be accumulated in daily life. At ordinary times, we should consciously remember the smell of our surroundings: asphalt roads, gardens, woods, kitchen seasoning pots, vegetable markets, etc. The goal of this exercise is to classify the various scents into broad categories-flowers, fruits, nuts, aromas, odors, etc. Finally understand the common characteristics of each odor type.

The formation of taste memory is a continuous time, in the process of tasting, whether perception, discrimination, identification, as well as comparison for judgment, are inseparable from memory.

The brain receives information, compares it, analyzes it, and remembers it.

This taste memory training is very powerful, it can transform the smell into a certain scene. Build your own taste memory bank. For example, smelling the fragrance of Yejia Xuefei, walking in the primitive forest would appear in my mind. The fragrance of flowers, the sweetness of fruits, and even the acidity of citrus fruits would bloom everywhere, causing saliva to secrete. In fact, this was a conditioned reflex. Many times we smell some smells will naturally associate with certain scenes, and even bring some emotions, this is also the result of our childhood often exposed to certain smells to form memories, this memory can even accompany our life, our brain neurons will generate new memory nerve cells in this process, this is the fundamental of learning and memory!

Memory of specific odors: This exercise involves blind smelling of various objects with your eyes closed. For example, fruity exercises. We smell fruits, we try to remember them, and then we blindfold a random fruit and we classify it: yellow fruit? Red and black fruit? Or dried fruit? And then what kind of fruit is it, and what state is it in: fresh? Mature? Overripe and decaying? Wait a minute. Even constantly increasing the types of odors, crossing and mixing various odors, can help learn to distinguish various odors.

In addition, we can also use the 36-smell bottle of coffee to help us establish the correct senses through long-term training. Of course, this kind of tool is, after all, artificially manufactured essential oil, and there is a gap between some of the more practical smells, so Xiaobian suggests that it is best to look for physical objects from daily life to carry out odor training ~ In addition, when using the smelling bottle training, Xiaobian recommends smelling the lid, and gently shaking the smelling bottle cap in front of the nose, try the smell floating out, instead of directly smelling the bottle, otherwise smelling a few bottles may cause dizziness!

Here is a practical demonstration:

Let's take the example of red wine coffee at Hartman Manor in Panama.

Red wine treatment (also known as carbon dioxide treatment)

Red wine treatment inspired by the winemaking process

This treatment involves removing the pulp and skin from the coffee beans, placing them in stainless steel containers, and adding carbon dioxide gas to make them oxygen-free. Sealing the fermentation tank allows coffee to develop more aromas by carefully controlling the oxygen and carbon dioxide in the tank.

This [Panama Hartman Manor] red wine treatment method flavor description: dry nutty aroma, wet red wine fermentation aroma, jasmine flower fragrance, lingering pear juice with honey, caramel aroma.

1. Dry nutty fragrance: This fragrance may wish to smell more when eating almonds and fried peanuts.

2. Wet red wine fermentation fragrance: so usually pay attention to smell red wine, even if you do not drink.

3. Jasmine flower fragrance: If you haven't smelled fresh jasmine flowers, it is similar to coffee flowers (No.12) in the fragrance bottle. In fact, jasmine tea can also be used. Remember to drink it several times. There is also the smell of honey in it.

4. Yu Yun Sydney juice: eat more fruit and more memory, coffee in a lot of fruit tonality, fruit training helps us find out from coffee.

5. After drinking honey and caramel at the bottom of the cup: basically corresponding to the flavor in the smelling bottle, but with the actual honey and caramel will be a little different. These two are also part of the sweetness we drink. (We will introduce the composition of coffee sweetness in the future, remember to pay attention to it!)

So that's the experience with sensory training, did you get it?