Explore three gadgets of coffee flavor: radar map, flavor wheel and taste index

Exploration of Coffee Flavor

Tasting coffee is an interesting thing. Coffee has different flavors from hot to cold. Here will introduce you three coffee tasting gadgets to help you better understand and remember the flavor of coffee and find the most appropriate way to describe this cup of coffee in your memory and in your hand.

Coffee radar map

In the radar map, we can evaluate the intensity of taste and smell.

When the coffee is hot, the aroma is more obvious, so start with the smell, follow your intuition, and mark the aroma according to different intensity.

Coffee flavor wheel

After marking the radar map, take a sip of coffee while the aroma is still obvious. At the prompt of Flavor Wheel, write down the aroma you drink. Of course, if you have a unique aroma feeling that is not on the flavor wheel, you are also encouraged to record it and share it with your partner.

The new SCAA Flavor Wheel in 2016 is the first update since the first Flavor Wheel was released in 21. Over the years, people have made more in-depth research on the Sensory and have a better understanding of why people recognize a certain taste or how to differentiate it, and the new flavor wheel can only be created by SCAA,World Coffee Research (WCR) and the efforts of many coffee makers, professional tasters and scientists.

The importance of the flavor wheel lies in unifying the language in which different people describe the taste of coffee. This consistency and the results of the research on taste senses help the industry communicate in studying the taste of coffee and decide how and where to grow coffee beans.

Coffee taste index

After the coffee is a little cooler, take another sip of coffee, and record the intensity of sour, sweet, bitter and mellow on the radar chart. In the process of tasting, choose an appropriate feeling to mark the sweet and sour or bitter-sweet feeling you drink, and evaluate the texture of the taste.

Unravel the mystery of smell

The sense of smell of the tongue has long been the most confusing sensation in the body, and even the basic principles of how to recognize or remember tens of thousands of smells are still unknown. The Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 2004 solved this doubt when they found a large group of gene families of about 1000 different genes, accounting for about 3% of all human genes, which produced the same number of olfactory receptor patterns. Olfactory receptors are located on olfactory receptor cells, which make up only a small portion of the nasal epithelium and are used to detect odor molecules in the air.

Each olfactory receptor cell has only one olfactory receptor, and each olfactory receptor can only detect a few odors, so the olfactory receptor cells are specific to odors. These cells use very thin fibers to send signals directly to the olfactory filament bulb located on the olfactory bulb, which is equivalent to the primary olfactory area of the brain. Cells with similar olfactory receptors send signals to the same olfactory filament bulb, which in turn sends signals to other parts of the brain, where signals from different olfactory receptors are combined and combined to form a pattern.

This mechanism allows us to smell the flowers of lilacs clearly in the spring and recall them later. Wine or wild strawberries activate whole groups of olfactory receptors, allowing us to smell different odor molecules. A particular smell, good or bad, can activate vivid childhood or emotional memories. On the contrary, losing the sense of smell can be a terrible thing, because not only can you not smell different foods, but also can not detect the alarm by the sense of smell. Each odor receptor cell responds to a limited number of related molecules.

Most odors are made up of a variety of gas molecules, in which each gas molecule activates multiple odor receptors and combines them into certain odor patterns through the "olfactory silk ball" and other areas of the brain. There are only about 1000 odor receptors, but they can produce a large number of combinations and form a large number of odor patterns, which is the basis on which people can identify and remember about 10, 000 different odors.

Know our tongues.

There are four major feelings of taste, sour, sweet, bitter and salty. The basic taste score is shown in the attached picture, but these areas are the results of experimental statistics, which is the case for most people, but it does not mean that everyone's taste score is as shown in the picture. After brushing your teeth, prepare some sweet, sour, bitter and salty food to test your tongue. Where is the division of the four major tastes? In addition to the four major tastes, Aroma is the first impression on coffee drinkers.

How to taste a good cup of coffee? Whether a cup of coffee is good or not is often subjective. Everyone has different feelings about the taste and likes it differently. If someone tells you that this cup of coffee tastes good and good but you don't feel good, maybe it's not that your tongue is not sensitive enough, but that people like different tastes.