Barista Magazine

DEC 2015 -JAN 2016

Serving People Serving Coffee Since 2005

Issue link: http://baristamagazine.epubxp.com/i/609699

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 71 of 91

How to Use the Wheels IF YOU'RE JUST TAKING YOUR FIRST SPIN around the Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel, designed and released by the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) in the early 1990s (and which is undergoing an update, to be released in coming months), the array of colors and descriptors can be a little intimidating. Here are a couple of tips for getting the most out of this tool, and using it as a launch- ing pad for developing your own coffee vocabulary. (Note: The Wine Aroma Wheel functions much the same way. They are cousins, after all.) • For consumers and beginners, it can be more revelatory to focus on the side of the wheel labeled "aromas." Really, the only tastes humans can experience are the combinations and degrees of potency of sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and savory; it's those tastes in conjunction with the aromas we experience in our olfactory system that make our taste buds tingle. • Some people prefer to move from the outside in, if a particular and specific aroma really strikes them; others like to use the tri-part inner ring to drive their analysis. Consider that a coffee has three different types of characteristics it can express: enzymatic (traits developed by the coffee plant itself), sugar-browning (traits that are developed in the roasting machine), and dry-distillation (traits created by the burning of cellular material in the roasting process). Think of the sugar browning as being the cooking of the pizza in its oven, and the dry distillation as the spots of char on the crust that give the dish its depth. • None of the terms on the wheel are arbitrary, nor are they univer- sal. While the outer ring might seem obstinately specific, the descrip- tors included all related back to commonly recognized flavor charac- teristics fou nd in specialty coffee. While you may never have smelled or tasted coriander seeds, you might be able to recognize something sort of darkly floral in a particular coffee, like anise or dill. This is why the wheel emphasizes real comparison, and not value terms (like "bold" or "rich"). • Most of all, don't sweat it: The wheel sometimes makes people feel like they're "faking" the notes they offer in a tasting, because, well, it all still does ultimately taste like coffee. Most coffee tasters, even to a certain professional level, should think of the wheel as helpfully suggestive, not hard-and-fast law. —Erin Meister The SCAA Flavor Wheel by the Specialty Coffee Association of America (©1995) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. For more information on the Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel, please visit www.scaa.org. 72 barista magazine

Articles in this issue

Links on this page

view archives of Barista Magazine - DEC 2015 -JAN 2016
Subscribe to email alerts