What should good coffee taste like?
To be honest, whatever the f you enjoy is the best coffee! Coffee and taste is subjective and each and every one of us have very different taste buds stemming from our upbringing and personal experiences.
However, let me point out a few ideas for you, otherwise this would be a really short post.
When talking coffee, I like to compare its characteristics to whiskey and wine, especially wine as I believe there are a lot of cross overs. Casting my tastebuds back to the beautiful wines in France, that my friends Julian and Jessica served us at their wedding, it was my first ‘aha’ moment. Just like wine, coffee should have a balanced taste, no notes should be a jagged edge or a lingering taste.
Most people tend to overuse the phrase ‘bitter’ when describing coffee notes. In specialty coffee, we talk about the balance of sweetness, acidity and bitterness. Coffee does not always have to be the perfect balance of these three profiles. When performing my routine at the 2017 NZ Barista Championships I mentioned “A good coffee should dance and circle the middle of your tongue, like a ballerina doing a pirouette.”
Flavour obviously plays a big part in this too and as mentioned earlier flavour comes down to us as individuals. Us humans like things that are different and special to us. With coffee we want to find different flavour profiles that relate to us. These different flavour profiles mainly come from the coffee bean itself and the way it is processed (processing is the way the coffee is handled and dried from fresh cherries to dry green beans ready to roast).
Specialty coffee is often roasted lighter as a dark roast will cover the uniqueness of the coffee. The tasting profiles like chocolate, caramel, cane sugar etc come from the Maillard reaction of roasting coffee and the released glucose. Just like a good steak you would never dare ask for it to be cooked ‘well done’ at a steak house.
Hopefully this blog post has given you a short and sweet overview on what good coffee should taste like, whilst prompting you to think about developing your pallet.
Happy coffee drinking guys!