The biggest desire of consumers and coffee lovers is to perceive the sensorial nuances that are described on the coffee package. How can we develop this sensory analysis of coffee?
Chocolate, fruity, floral notes? Acidity, sweetness, body? How do we learn these peculiarities and understand which one we like most?
Specialty Coffees provide a description of the sensory that that bean can offer, which often guides our purchasing decision.
We have already seen here in the column what quality coffee is. Which are coffees that achieve better scores in a sum of attributes, such as fragrance, aroma, uniformity, absence of defects, sweetness, flavor, acidity, body, finish and harmony. The highest scored are those that strike a balance between these attributes. Specialty coffee is coffee that achieves at least 80 points (on a scale of up to 100), according to the criteria of the SCA (Specialty Coffee Association), represented in Brazil by the BSCA (Brazilian Specialty Coffee Association).
This type of coffee is the result of all the differentiated work that is done on the farm. From choosing the seedling, soil nutrition, post-harvest care, processing and roasting. However, each coffee is unique, and this infinity of flavors is the richness of this market.
Those who evaluate the coffee are Q-graders, who are certified professionals, with extensive development in sensory analysis and follow strict national and international protocols.
We call coffee sensory all the sensations we have when tasting it, and it goes far beyond aroma and flavor. It is a multisensory activity, that is, it is the sum of the perception of several stimuli captured by our five senses (sight, touch, hearing, taste and smell), which translate into certain impressions.
Dr. Fabiana Carvalho, a neuroscientist (PhD) who contributes greatly to these studies, proves in her scientific research that the color and shape of cups, packaging and environment directly influence the perception of the drink's flavor, mainly on impressions about acidity and sweetness.
We have a sensory library, you know?
Throughout our lives we feed this library with the sensations that certain stimuli provoke. All this complexity is caused by synesthesia or the brain's ability to group the response of stimuli (chemical and physical) through our senses. We call this memory the sensory library.
This means that the greater the diversity of foods you have tasted and learned to name, the greater your sensory repertoire. How could we identify the scent of jasmine if we have never smelled this aroma or called it jasmine?
Taste is what we capture through our taste buds. Science has already advanced to name other tastes, but their receptors have not yet been identified. Let's focus on the ones we already know: sweet, salty, acidic, bitter and umami. Coffee has chemical compounds that relate to the five.
When we chew something, aromas are released, and, through our breathing, they are directed to the retronasal cavity, where the olfactory cells are. Flavor is formed by the combination of taste and aroma. This is how, in a blind tasting, we identify the flavor of something.
Coffees that present sensory notes will still taste like coffee, but with aromas that refer to other elements, such as chocolate, oilseeds, fruits, floral and herbaceous aromas.
These patterns, which are commonly found in coffees, are described in the flavor wheel developed for SCA, which helps a lot in guiding sensory notes. The flavor wheel describes 110 characteristics obtained from the analysis of 105 coffee samples studied, which also point out defects, things that are not desirable in coffees, which could be due to the poor quality of the beans or problems with roasting.
To understand the flavor wheel, start from the inside out. In the center, there is the primary information from the Flavor Wheel. From there, each group branches out into more specific characteristics, until we reach the outer end of the wheel.
Taste the coffee and try to identify: does it remind you of fruit, cocoa, nut, sweet, spice? Assuming it looks more like fruit, would you be able to tell which one? Is it sweet, citrusy, red?
And so, we open the range to the most unique flavors of Roda. Everything is training, studying and many liters of coffee!
References: https://baristawave.com/
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