How do beginners learn to taste individual coffee and how to describe the flavor characteristics of hand-brewed coffee?

After years of development, boutique coffee has formed a scientific system, from raw bean planting, processing, to roasting, and then to brewing, tasting, have a very perfect knowledge system.

The improvement of the quality of raw beans, roasting and brewing is ultimately for us to get a better experience in tasting coffee. So learning to taste is also an important part of learning coffee. There are also some professional courses in coffee tasting, such as Q-Grader (coffee quality appraiser) for people in the industry, and SCA coffee sensory tasting course for coffee lovers.

These courses can play a role in combing coffee knowledge and correcting coffee flavor senses for those who have a certain knowledge base of coffee. For pure rookies, there is a big difference between the high tuition fees and the knowledge absorbed. Therefore, Qianjie does not recommend that novice rookies sign up for coffee courses enthusiastically. They can first watch and learn some basic knowledge of coffee readily available, and then it is not too late to choose. Of course, the booming development of boutique coffee has also attracted many friends who want to learn about coffee, including those who are eager to learn to taste the flavor of coffee, and they also want to drink a certain type of coffee like coffee professionals. can blurt out dozens of flavor descriptions. As for the question of where beginners should learn to taste coffee, Qianjie has some suggestions, if interested friends can try to follow suit.

-drink more! If you ask the barista, "Why are you so sensitive to the flavor of coffee?" The reply is probably "drink often, drink more and you can taste the coffee." This is actually very reasonable. All the memories of coffee flavor or taste are accumulated through constant taste and memory, unless you have an "imperial tongue" or a strong memory, so that you can not forget after tasting it. Otherwise, you still have to drink coffee often and remember the characteristics of each kind of coffee.

Even if you take a professional coffee tasting course, you have to accumulate the flavor library by constantly tasting the coffee, otherwise you will only get a certificate in exchange for a high tuition fee. -put aside the flavor first and judge the taste. If you force yourself to say something anyway, it would be a bit hard and hasty. Coffee tasting is a long accumulation process, there is no crash course. If you are a novice in learning to taste coffee to describe flavor, but learn from scratch, Qianjie advises you to forget about flavor description, start with the basics of drinking coffee and say how you feel. The sense of coffee belongs to a more subjective judgment, which depends on individual taste preferences, but also depends on the sensitivity to various flavors. On the other hand, the coffee tasting is subjective and objective, that is, we can not judge whether a coffee is good or bad according to one's own preferences, but objectively describe what it tastes like and what it tastes like. It is the easiest to distinguish the taste of a cup of coffee, because there are only five kinds of taste, which are sweet, sour, bitter and salty, while most of the time, there are only three kinds of taste of coffee. In front of the street, for example, when we taste a washed Yejasuffi coffee bean, we can taste a very obvious sour taste, and at this time, we need to judge whether the sour taste is irritating acidity, sweet and sour fruit acid, soft acid, or fermented acetic acid.

When you taste a Brazilian coffee bean, you can clearly sense that the coffee is full of bitterness, but we need to judge whether the bitterness belongs to comfortable bitterness, intense bitterness, extremely uncomfortable bitterness, or bitterness. Or taste a little sweetness from the bitterness, a little chocolate. Use this analogy to try different kinds of coffee and sort them. For example, A, B, C three kinds of coffee are sour coffee, but if the acidity arrangement is A > B > C, judging by the acidity, A's acid is a bit irritating, sharp and uncomfortable. B although it is sour, it tastes comfortable and pleasant. C is very sour and sweet, sour and sweet, like drinking compound fruit juice. First, memorize the taste of coffee in this way, and develop a subconscious way to taste the taste of coffee when drinking coffee. Understand the flavor of coffee the flavor we describe is made up of taste and aroma. And the aroma of coffee is the source of many flavors. The reason why we use other physical objects to describe the flavor of coffee, on the one hand, we can taste similar to other real things (fruits) from the coffee, on the other hand, it can also give people who have not tasted this coffee a portrait of the taste of this coffee. Therefore, the flavor descriptions we use are some common and often eaten foods in our daily life.

Qianjie, for example, is convenient for everyone to understand. if the barista introduces to you that this coffee bean tastes like strawberry, it is understood that in taste, the sour sweetness of coffee beans is similar to that of berries such as strawberries, while in aroma, you can feel the aroma characteristics of strawberries on the coffee. For example, in the coffee flavor description, roses, jasmine, vanilla, mango, roasted sweet potato and honey (water) are all reflected by the aroma. Therefore, if, in addition to drinking and tasting more coffee, you usually need to carefully savor the aroma characteristics of the food around you, you can only memorize these flavors in the brain's flavor bank and smell a similar aroma in the coffee next time. To react immediately to what kind of flavor it is.