Training Sensory Skills with Solutions Tasting

In every class, workshop, and seminar, we ask roasters what skills they're hoping to improve. Resoundingly, the answer is the same: sensory skills. All coffee people know that, to dial in a great roast or brew recipe, you need to hone your palate. You need to be able to identify flavors and their relative intensity. But for many people at the start of their coffee journey, the path to becoming a highly trained taster is hazy. Roasters often don't know where to begin. 

Training to Taste

We answer with a simple directive: taste more coffee. Taste a lot of different origins and roast profiles, taste with others and discuss your experience, and record your notes. Taste intentionally and frequently. Schedule time in your week to taste. Taste things that aren't coffee, like tea, juice, cocktails, wine, seasonal produce, and take notes on those flavors, too. Taste, taste, taste. Notice a pattern?

While this answer is helpful, it's broad. Many students want a specific assignment or exercise that they can set up at home. Here's one we use in our Advanced Roasting Workshop. It's called a solutions tasting. This is an easy exercise to do on your own or with a small group of friends. It's inexpensive, and the items needed are easy to source. The goal is to help you identify some of the key flavor characteristics found in coffee, like sweetness, acidity, and bitterness, and to rank their relative intensity. 

Preparation: 

1. Source ingredients to build solutions. For acidity, we use citric acid. For sweetness, white sugar. Bitterness could be a ground-up aspirin pill (like Bayer) or a caffeine pill (check your local truck stop pharmacy). We also sometimes include salt, which can be tasted in very underextracted espresso shots, and use plain sea salt to build that solution. 
2. Build a strong concentration of each flavor compound. Start with ~200g of distilled water, and add 5g-10g of your flavoring agent, stirring to combine. Taste this concentrate; it should be strong. 
3. Use the flavor concentrate to create a low, medium, and high intensity solution of each flavor. This could be done in cupping bowls. Here's an example: 
   1. Acidity Solution: 
      
      1. Lowest intensity: 10g concentrate + 100g distilled water
      2. Medium intensity: 20g concentrate + 90g distilled water
      3. Highest intensity: 30g concentrate + 80g distilled water
4. Build the intensity solutions for all flavors. Mix each cup thoroughly, discreetly label them (we mark the bottom of the cup with dry-erase pens), and set them on the table. Arrange them in random order. We usually group the same flavors together, so tasters only need to identify and rank within one set. 

Identification and Ranking

Taste each solution the same way you would slurp coffee in a cupping, with a cupping spoon. Use a cup to spit each sip after tasting. On an answer sheet, or in your notebook,  record which flavor is in the cup and what the intensity of each cup is. 

For a bonus round, create combinations. Using a medium-strength solution, combine your concentrates and water so that each cup contains two or three flavors (i.e., salt and sweet, or sweet and bitter). Coffee is complex; this exercise challenges tasters to try to decipher individual flavors in a complex solution. 

Finally, consider "spiking" a control coffee with low levels of each flavor compound, and try to identify which flavor is in the coffee. 

Tasting with students with food coloring added to solutions. 

Improving Vocabulary and Perception

Many newer coffee tasters conflate acidity with bitterness. Both are intense flavors that can be unpleasant. This exercise is a good way to train your palate to recognize the difference between these two flavors, and to pay careful attention to intensity, or strength of flavor. As you progress as a coffee taster, recording observations on the intensity of acidity, sweetness, or bitterness in coffee is a helpful differentiator between roasts.