What's the smell of white flowers in the coffee? How does the hand-brewed coffee smell like flowers?

When we buy coffee beans, we can see attractive flower fragrance descriptions on the labels of some beans, and one will buy them directly if we can't help it. But when it is finished, when it comes to tasting and drinking, this often happens: "where is the fragrance of flowers? where is the scent of my flowers? why can't I drink it?"

The fragrance of flowers belongs to a special flavor in coffee. Even if we buy beans with a description of flowers, it is not easy to taste them. At this time, a friend will ask: "is there any way to make the coffee and flower aroma more obvious?" Well, before that, we might as well find out why some coffee beans have a floral aroma.

Why does the coffee smell like flowers? The reason why some coffee has a rich floral fragrance has something to do with its bean species, planting area and post-processing (details can be moved to this article: how coffee flavor is formed)! However, in order to evolve from seeds to the coffee we can drink, we have to go through the process of baking, and the depth of roasting is the key to grasping the fragrance of flowers!

When the beans are roasted in the oven, the aroma substances in the coffee beans will constantly change under the blessing of various reactions, and the deeper the roast, the easier it is to wear away the flower fragrance; moreover, the flower fragrance belongs to a type that is easily covered by other flavors. when the roasting is too deep and the concentration of other flavors increases, the flower fragrance will be easily covered. So generally speaking, beans with floral description will use the baking degree of "medium shallow". In this baking degree, there is not much flavor that can cover the fragrance of flowers, and it is when the stock of floral flavor substances is the most!

The type of flower fragrance is the same as the different kinds of fruit flavor we have tasted, and the flower fragrance also has different types, but the classification here does not mean that the aroma is classified into white flower fragrance and purple flower fragrance, but according to the type of smell we feel. In the flower fragrance, there are three main types: fragrant type, smelly type, and fragrant type.

As the name implies, the fragrance of this kind of flowers will give people a fresh and elegant feeling. Among them, the white flower scent is the most typical representative, and it is also a kind of flower fragrance with the highest frequency in our cognition. The fragrance of the flowers will give people a soft and soothing feeling. And roses, lavender, is the classic fragrance of flowers! The smelly flower scent is somewhat different from the previous two types of flowers, it will be more powerful, it will smell a little choking fragrance, that is, the aroma will be a little choking at the beginning. This kind of flower aroma is mainly represented by sweet-scented osmanthus and chamomile. Here to add a knowledge point, "White Flower fragrance" this description covers a large group of flowers, in addition to conventional jasmine, camellia, coffee flowers, it also includes white orchids, gardenias, white roses and other white flowers.

Because when tasting coffee, the flavor aroma gathered together can not let us clearly distinguish which kind of specific flower fragrance it belongs to. After all, the aroma tone of this kind of white flowers is roughly the same. Therefore, people simply call this kind of flower fragrance "white flower fragrance".

So, is there a knack for rushing out the scent of flowers? Indeed, according to the research of American biologist Dr. Hackelot and SCAA consultant Ringer, the extraction process of coffee is to dissolve the flavor molecules in coffee through hot water, and the molecular weight and polarity determine the speed of the dissolution of flavor molecules!

Basically, the dissolution rate of flavor molecules with small mass and high polarity is faster, while that of flavor molecules with large mass and small polarity is slower. Flower flavor belongs to low polar molecules, which takes a long time to extract! Not only that, but as mentioned earlier, it is also a molecule with very weak sensory stimulation. If the concentration, or other flavor is too high, the fragrance of the flowers will be very difficult to be captured by our senses.

How hypocritical! It is difficult to extract and easy to cover, so if you want to taste the fragrance of flowers obviously, don't you have to increase the extraction rate and reduce the concentration at the same time? Not to mention, in 2020, SCA commissioned the University of California to conduct an extraction experiment. The experimental results show that the coffee with low concentration and high extraction does have a more obvious floral aroma! Then the answer is very simple, we only need to change the brewing parameters, with a flower-scented beans, then the result is not a cup of coffee with fragrant flowers!

Reducing the concentration is easy to understand, which means we need more water to dilute the coffee, just increase the powder-to-water ratio! Qianjie daily production of hand flushing is mainly 1:15 powder water ratio, if you want to dilute the concentration to release the fragrance of flowers, then the ratio can be raised to 1:16! (Qianjie has compared the ratio of powder to water at 1:16 and 1:17, and found that the concentration of coffee at 1:17 is too diluted to meet the needs of friends with heavier tastes.) there are many ways to improve the extraction rate: raise the water temperature, fine grind, or increase the degree of stirring! Qianjie is recommended to increase the mixing degree, because the first two changes mean that you need to modify other parameters, otherwise you will need to bear the risk of overextraction, so in the case of ensuring stability, increasing mixing must be the best choice!

When cooking, the stirring effect is the flow of water when injecting water. We can increase the stirring and the extraction rate by appropriately increasing the impact of the water or the number of circles. So needless to say, Qianjie directly used a bean with fragrant flower scent for cooking experiment! The extraction parameters are as follows: using beans: Ethiopian gold standard Rosa Rosa using bean weight: 15g powder: water ratio: 1:16 (usually 1:15) boiling water temperature: 92 °C Grinding scale: 10 scale of Ek43, 70% screening rate of No. 20 sieve using filter cup: V60 cooking method: three-stage three-stage water injection is: steaming 30ml, and the second stage at the end of steaming is 140ml with uniform speed (usually slow) and injected around a large circle. The third section is 70ml, which is injected around a small circle at a uniform speed.

The total extraction time is 2 minutes and 12 seconds. Compared with the gold standard rose extracted with the original parameters (1:15 and slow circle), this cup does have a more fragrant aroma of white flowers, softer sour and sweet fruit, with an obvious green tea finish. It's not bad! Go ahead and try it.

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