Where does the aroma of coffee come from? why does fine coffee smell better than drink?

Most of the time, when you brew coffee and test coffee in the Qianjie coffee factory, you will feel the fragrance of flowers and fruits in the air, or the smell of caramel, sugar, honey and so on. When a hot cup of coffee enters the mouth, it doesn't have the wonderful feeling it smells like, or to put it bluntly, it's not as mellow as it smells.

To solve this mystery, you have to understand the flavor and smell of coffee. Some sour and sweet tastes are water-soluble and volatile, and you can smell them and drink them.

Coffee flavor

Coffee flavor < Flavors > consists of volatile aroma < Gases >, water soluble taste < Tastes > and taste < Mouthfeel >.

The volatile aroma includes dry and wet fragrance, as well as the sense of smell before and after the nose.

The water-soluble taste includes sweet, sour, bitter and salty taste and oral taste.

The taste includes smoothness and astringency as well as oral touch, which is the result of the interaction of different proportions of sweet, sour, bitter and salty.

Smells good.

It smells better than it tastes, actually because coffee beans are roasted and mixed with volatile ingredients such as esters, aldehydes or organic acids through the "Mena reaction".

Coffee is blessed with a wide variety of complex chemicals, in addition to the above-mentioned compounds, there are other organic acids, inorganic acids, plant bases and so on.

When grinding or brewing, these volatile components or organic acids are gasified to give us a pleasant aroma of coffee.

Most of the more than 850 aromatic substances in coffee are only volatile, so they can only be identified by the sense of smell, and the other part has the bidirectional nature of volatilization and water solubility, so it can be felt by smell and taste, but coffee is the least pure water-soluble aromatic substances. it depends on taste buds to identify.

Most of the aromatic substances in coffee are volatile, so many people find coffee more enjoyable to smell than to drink.

The sense of smell before and after the nose

The general sensory detection flavor of our human body is: smell > taste > taste.

The breadth and accuracy of olfactory recognition is greater than that of taste and taste, because smell is the only sense with two-way function. The nose can smell the smell of the external world, that is, the "prenasal smell" (Orthonasal olfactory), but the mouth can also "smell" the smell of food eaten into the mouth, that is, the "post-nasal smell" (Retronasal olfactory).

Coffee has volatile aroma of caramel, cream, sour, flower, fruit, herb, nut, grain, resin, wine, spice, coke, soil, firewood and potion. The gasification components are all presented by the sense of smell in front of the nose and in the back of the nose.

Some sweet and sour flavor molecules are volatile and water-soluble, so the sense of smell and taste can be enjoyed; but the unpleasant bitter and salty taste is water-soluble, not volatile, and can only be felt by the sense of taste, so many people will think the coffee smells good.

However, studies have also pointed out that another reason for the change in coffee taste is that 300 of the 631 chemicals that make up coffee flavor are killed by saliva, causing it to change before we swallow.

In Mr. Han Huaizong's Coffee Science, he explained that coffee smells better than it tastes better because it is related to the sense of smell in front of and behind the nose, which can distinguish thousands of different aromas, but the taste can only feel sour, sweet, bitter, salty and fresh. five water-soluble flavors.

Other studies have shown that chocolate and lavender are two known flavors that feel the same when entering and emitting from the nose.