What coffee is sweeter? How to describe the sweetness of hand-brewed black coffee?

Life is short, of course you should drink sweet coffee.

If we say that coffee is bitter, no matter those who drink coffee or those who do not drink coffee often, most people should have no objection; if coffee is sour, I believe that those who love acid will agree with it; but if coffee is sweet, that may cause a wave of controversy.

As a matter of fact, everyone's eating habits are different, and their discrimination between sweet and sour, bitter and salty will naturally be different. even if they drink the same pot of coffee, some people will think it is extremely sweet, but some people think it is so bitter that they can't drink a second sip at all.

But in every process, from the way coffee is grown and handled to roasting and brewing, people will do everything they can to make it sweeter. What the baristas call "sweet" refers more to the sweetness that coexists in a pile of sour and bitter taste.

In the same way as the sweetness value of fruit, the sweetness of coffee fruit is mainly affected by variety, planting management, altitude, picking maturity and other factors. On the other hand, the post-treatment method and the baking degree (time) determine the amount of sweet substances retained in coffee beans, and the degree of sugar transformation, such as honey treatment and sun-cured coffee, are more likely to show sweet flavor.

In the roasting stage of coffee beans, experienced bakers will caramelize the aroma substances in raw beans as much as possible and show a sweeter flavor, such as sucrose, chocolate, honeydew, preserved fruit, honey, ripe fruit and other sweet flavor types that can be judged by description.

The sweetness of a bag of roasted coffee beans can be said to be an objective fixed value, and sweetness is a flavor description that includes taste and smell when people taste it. At this time, the level of sweetness is related to the extraction methods, techniques, and the sensory sensitivity of the tasters. For example, drinking sun-red roses in Qianjie feels obvious cantaloupe-like sweetness in summer, Yega Xuefei has a honey similar to the scent of flowers, and birds of paradise is as sweet as sugar cane.

It is the nature of many of us to like sweetness and be afraid of bitterness. The reason why many friends who have just come into contact with boutique coffee do not realize the "sweetness" described by baristas is that they are more sensitive to bitterness than sweetness.

When bitterness and sweetness exist in a pot of coffee at the same time, the first thing we feel is often bitterness, and a sense of sweetness stays at the base of the tongue after swallowing. The sweetness of this bitter coffee is often described as "Huigan", that is, the so-called bitter sweet, which is most common in medium and deep roasted coffee. For example, Blue Mountain one and Golden Manning will show this kind of rhyme.

For sour coffee, if you want to feel sweet, you often need to rely on bitterness and sour foil and coordination. For example, light and medium roasted coffee itself contains less bitter substances, after a reasonable extraction of fruit acid and aroma, coffee will rely on high acidity and low bitterness to show a sweet and sour feeling, reminiscent of the taste of eating certain fruits. For example, Qianjie can obviously feel the low bitterness, medium acidity and high melon sweetness when tasting the rosy summer of Panamanian Poquet.

Of course, in addition to the sense of taste in the mouth, the sense of smell will also bring us a different sense of sweetness. The sense of smell is divided into two stages, one is the sense of smell before the nose, the other is the sense of smell after the nose. The former is responsible for feeling the smell inhaled directly, such as smelling freshly ground coffee powder directly, that is, using the sense of smell in front of the nose.

When the coffee liquid enters the mouth, the taste buds first judge the strength of the sweet, sour, bitter and salty taste, and then the aroma substance "slips" into the nasal cavity during swallowing, and the brain will quickly combine the taste with the aroma in the nasal passage. thus showing the flavor of a particular food in memory, this is the sense of smell behind the nose. When the directional aroma of smell behind the nose is reminiscent of sweet food in our memory, we subconsciously feel that this cup of coffee is very sweet.

Finally, if the coffee beans have been decided, it represents that the general direction of the flavor has been determined and cannot be changed, then we can regulate the sour, sweet and bitter up and down through different cooking methods. Among them, how to flush out the sweetness of coffee is a problem that people pay more attention to. For the specific operation of rushing out sweetness, Qianjie wrote in the previous article, "I heard that there is a set of formulas that can make coffee sweeter?" "there has been sharing in the past, and those who are interested can read it.

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