What are the coffee tasting methods? How to appreciate a good cup of coffee? How to taste hand-brewed coffee?

For us as consumers, whether a cup of coffee tastes good or not mainly depends on whether its taste is in line with our own taste preferences, we can look at a cup of coffee with a very strong subjective color and evaluate it. If the taste of it makes you want to drink constantly, then this cup of coffee is a good cup of coffee for you. But if its taste is not in line with your preference, then even if others say it is good, it will be labeled as bad by you.

However, if you want to seriously feel the good or bad of a cup of coffee, you need to lower your subjective perspective, try to balance your subjective and observable, and examine a cup of coffee from many different angles. just like the judges in major coffee competitions. Find out the shortcomings of a cup of coffee by "finding fault", rather than judging by whether the taste is in line with your preferences. For example, if there is no deficiency in the performance of this cup of coffee in all aspects, then even if you don't like the cup of coffee subjectively, you can't let this subjective factor influence your judgment of the whole cup of coffee. And this, there is a special term to describe, that is "taste".

I wonder if friends have noticed that Qianjie often describes drinking a cup of coffee as "tasting coffee" rather than "drinking coffee" in its articles. Many friends may think that such a description is to increase the advanced sense. Actually, uh. This is not always the case.

"tasting" means tasting and distinguishing, which is different from drinking coffee. The reason why we use the word tasting when drinking individual coffee is to analyze it from other angles besides the taste. So what criteria should be used to judge whether a cup of coffee is good or not, and how to judge it?

Qianjie integrates the COE cup meter and thinks that we can examine it from these aspects! Of course, we do not need to go through the cup test, after all, for the vast majority of friends, it is not necessary. So, when we usually make coffee, we try to observe and examine that cup of coffee from the following angles.

Aroma after grinding coffee beans into powder, the first thing we need to feel is its aroma. Thousands of aromas produced by baking are imprisoned in the bean body, and when the whole bean body is disintegrated, these aromas will rush out. Then at this time, it is the best time to feel these aromas. Under reasonable baking, most of the beans smell very good. Light baked beans give off fruit, flower, or slightly toasted aromas; deep baked beans give off flavors of spices, chocolate, pine and baked nuts, and if baked very deeply, we can also smell the grease that spills over the bean surface.

What I said above is the dry aroma of coffee powder. When we use hot water to brew this coffee powder, we can have a second olfactory experience and feel its wet fragrance. Compared with dry incense, wet incense is not very rich in performance. But we can still smell some aroma. For example, light roasted coffee will give off light floral aroma, or sweet and sour preserved fruit aroma; deep-roasted coffee will emit roasted nut, hazelnut, caramel chocolate and other aromas.

The richness of the aroma mainly depends on the substance content of the beans, and the more the beans contain, the more abundant the aroma will be. And when we can't smell the obvious aroma in this feeling, or feel a lot of uncomfortable smell, then subconsciously, we will think that this cup of coffee will not perform very well, that is, we will get a low score. It should be noted that because the feeling of aroma is not assisted by taste, it is more difficult for us to associate with a concrete flavor. So with regard to olfactory experience, because there is no way to share through words, you can only rely on your constant sniffing accumulation, hearing and feeling to improve your skills.

Acid quality in this article two days ago, Qianjie highlighted that acid quality refers to the quality of acid rather than the strength of acid. The balance of sweet, sour and bitter is the foundation of a cup of coffee. If the acidity is too strong or the bitterness is too prominent, then the cup of coffee will be directly PASS. Back to the sour quality, when we taste the coffee, if the sour coffee gives you a very cordial fresh fruit sour taste, then we can understand that this cup of coffee has a good sour quality. And often this kind of acid will be described as "lively acid" or "soft acid" according to its performance.

And if the sour performance of this cup of coffee makes you uncomfortable, it is something similar to overfermentation, or vinegar, then it can be defined as negative acidity. The corresponding descriptions are: "acid", "acetic acid", and "sharp acid".

Of course, these descriptions are limited to light roasted coffee. Deep-roasted coffee like Manning does not feel sour, so there is no need for sour feeling.

Sweet feeling

Whether it is lightly roasted sour coffee or deep-roasted bitter coffee, we can feel the sweetness contained in it. However, this sweetness is not simply felt by the taste buds like sugar, but by the sense of smell.

Because the sugar in coffee has long been broken down in the process of baking, the sweetness in coffee is not as sweet as we usually understand. (this also requires us to drink more and feel more before we can understand.)

And the more sweet, the better. After all, sweetness makes the brain secrete dopamine, which makes us feel happy! This is the same truth for coffee. Therefore, the sweeter the coffee is, the better it is.

Taste

In addition to smell and taste, we also need to use the sense of touch to taste a cup of coffee. The reason why we need to use the sense of touch is that we have to feel the texture of coffee, or taste for short. This requires us to use the touch of the mouth and tongue to feel.

There are two aspects that require tactile perception, one is the "thickness" of coffee, and the other is the smoothness of coffee. Coffee "thickness" refers to the sense of weight of coffee, just like the experience of drinking yogurt, we can obviously feel the thick texture of yogurt. The degree of smoothness refers to whether there is a delicate, silky experience when drinking coffee. If a cup of coffee tastes silky and carries a lot of weight, then we will use words such as mellow, smooth, solid and full to describe it according to our performance.

And if this cup of coffee tastes as light as water, or very rough, then even if this cup of coffee has a good performance in front, but our impression of it will be greatly reduced.

Cleanliness

If the coffee we drink does not make us feel those unpleasant smells and levels, then we will describe the cup of coffee as very clean! High cleanliness!

But if it has some flavors that do not belong to normal coffee, such as earthy, sawdust, medicine, rubber, bitterness, bitterness and so on, it will affect the performance of other flavors. In that case, this cup of coffee will not have a high opinion because of its poor cleanliness.

Yu Yun

Yuyun is the last expression we need to feel after we swallow coffee.

When we swallow the coffee, we close our mouths and exhale the aroma through our noses so that we can feel the aftertaste of the coffee. The strength of the aroma smelled and the length of time are all the criteria for us to judge. The more obvious the aroma and the longer the aftertaste, the better the performance of this cup of coffee, and vice versa.

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