Coffee Flavour Wheel
Have you ever wondered how we come up with the flavour notes for our coffees (check out our shop to see some examples!)? Do we just pull random words out of a hat and hope they mean something to someone (no way)? Is it just something we make up to sound good (definitely not!)?
The truth is that we work from a coffee flavour wheel. In fact, most coffee professionals do. A coffee flavour wheel helps you identify the flavours that naturally occur in coffee. And it just takes a little bit of practice to start doing it yourself.
Coffee Flavour Wheel
This coffee flavour wheel is a collaborative effort between the World Coffee Research organisation and the Specialty Coffee Association of America. It was first created in 1995 to establish a common vocabulary for tasters around the world. Whether you use this one, or another wheel (and there are others), they’re all used in the same way. Here’s how.
How to Use a Coffee Flavour Wheel
Before you begin, it’s important to talk about what we mean when we say ‘flavour’. Because it’s not simply the taste, but also the aroma, and even the feel in the mouth, making it a multi-sensory experience. When you select a flavour from the wheel, you’ll want to keep all of those elements in mind.
Step 1: Prepare Your Coffee
As a vital first step you need to prepare your coffee very carefully. You want to observe and take in the coffee at each stage. The fragrance just after grinding the beans and how this changes or develops when water hits the grounds. The flavour that hits the front of the mouth, the tongue and the back of the throat as you take your first sip.
At this stage you’re just taking it in. But next we’ll turn to the wheel.
Step 2: Start in the Centre
The wheel encourages you to start in the centre and move outwards, narrowing down the flavour profile as you go. You might not be able to recognise the flavours right off the bat. But what you can do is strike off those that are definitely not applicable. And then, through comparison, move around the wheel.
So, for example, perhaps you can’t taste hazelnuts, but you are getting nutty aromatics. Once you identify this, then you can’t start looking at the specific nuts in the wheel and find the one that you can most closely associate with the flavour you’re tasting.
If you can’t get any more specific than just ‘nutty’ that’s OK, too. That’s still a helpful, and probably highly accurate result. However, the more you practice tasting your coffee with the help of the coffee flavour wheel, the better you’ll become at getting specific.
Step 3: Start Again
Once you’ve identified one flavour, start again. Move back into the centre of the wheel and identify another flavour that you might be tasting. Use the same process to move from the centre to a more and more specific explanatory word. You can do this over and over, identifying more and more flavours, until you feel that your description of the coffee is complete.
For our purposes here at Coffee DRs we tend to identify maybe three different primary flavours and convey those to our customers. While we often taste many other flavours just within one coffee variety, it’s not usually very helpful to list a long line of descriptors. It’s simply overwhelming rather than helpful.
Step 4: Understand the Vocabulary
Every word on the flavour coffee wheel has its own associated definition. And understanding this will certainly help you describe the coffee better. These definitions are written for professionals, so will likely include a lot of unfamiliar words—chemical and technical descriptions of flavours, for example. But they’re also very useful for describing to you the elements of a particular flavour on the flavour coffee wheel.
Step 5: Enjoy!
At the end of the day, we drink coffee because we enjoy it. So while the flavour coffee wheel gives us more information that can help us to understand coffee better (and so perhaps choose better coffee for our own preferences) all that really matters is that you like what you’re drinking!
Shop all of our coffees here and have your own personal tasting session with the attached coffee flavour wheel. Be sure to let us know what you find out!