What tasting notes on a coffee bag mean

Coffee tasting notes are comparisons. When a bag says blueberry, nobody added blueberries or flavoring. The roaster is telling you that this coffee, brewed well and drunk black, reminds them of blueberry. The notes come from the plant and the place it grew, from the way the cherry was processed, and from the roast.

Why coffee can smell of fruit at all

A roasted coffee bean holds a large family of aroma compounds, and some of them are the same compounds found in fruit, in flowers, in nuts and in chocolate. When one group of them stands out in a particular coffee, your brain matches it to the closest thing it knows. That match is the tasting note.

This is why notes read like a list of foods. They are the most useful shorthand anyone has found for a smell. They are also why a single coffee can remind one person of peach and another of apricot. Both are describing the same thing with the nearest word they have.

Where the notes come from

Three things shape what a coffee can taste of before it reaches your kitchen.

The tree and the slope

Variety and place set the starting point. Altitude matters because cold nights slow the ripening of the cherry, and a cherry that ripens slowly has longer to fill out its seed, which tends to give a denser bean with more flavor. Our farms all sit between 1,650 and 2,050 meters. Soil and rain show up later in the cup, and so does how ripe the cherry was when it was picked. On our farms every cherry is picked by hand, and only when it is fully red.

The process

What happens to the cherry after picking can move the flavor a long way. In a natural, the whole cherry dries around the seed. Our Ethiopia is dried that way, on raised beds for up to three weeks and turned by hand every hour, and it carries hints of blueberry, jasmine, peach. In a washed coffee the fruit is removed before drying, which tends to give a cleaner cup where acidity and sweetness do the talking. Our Colombia is washed, and has hints of red cherry, panela, cacao nib. Why Ethiopian coffee tastes like blueberry goes deeper into that one note.

The roast

A light roast keeps the fruit and flowers. A darker roast builds notes of its own from browned sugar: caramel, nuts, chocolate. Our Guatemala, a dark roast, has hints of toasted almond and brown sugar, with a little orange at the end. The almond and brown sugar are the kind of notes roasting creates. The orange is acidity, and acidity comes from the bean.

How roasters choose the words

The usual method is cupping: several people taste the coffee next to others, write down what they find, and compare. Words that only one taster found tend to drop off. Words that keep coming back make the bag. Most bags end up with two to four notes, chosen because they are the clearest. The cup always holds more than that.

There is a shared vocabulary behind this. World Coffee Research worked with sensory scientists at Kansas State University to build the World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon, which defines 110 attributes a coffee can have, each paired with a reference, often an ordinary food, that tasters use to judge its intensity. The Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel, which the Specialty Coffee Association rebuilt with World Coffee Research in 2016, is drawn from it.

Some notes need a word of explanation. Panela is unrefined cane sugar, boiled down and set in blocks, common across Colombia; it is darker and deeper than white sugar, with a touch of molasses. Cacao nibs are crushed pieces of cacao bean, the bitter chocolate before anyone sweetens it. Jasmine is the white flower, closer to jasmine tea than to perfume.

Why you might not taste them

A tasting note is a hint. It will not make the cup taste of fruit juice, which is why we write "hints of." Plenty of things can hide a note that is really there:

• The coffee is too hot. Most fruit and sweetness show up as the cup cools.
• The brew is off. Sour and thin usually means the coffee was under extracted, and bitter and dry usually means over extracted. Both drown the notes.
• Milk and sugar cover the lighter notes, especially fruit and flowers.
• The beans are old, or were ground long before brewing. Aroma is the first thing to go.
• You have no reference for the word. If you have never smelled panela, you cannot match it.

How to find the notes in your cup

1. Brew the coffee black, with a recipe you trust. How to taste coffee like a roaster has the method.
2. Taste it before you read the notes, and write down one word of your own.
3. Now read the notes and taste again. Knowing where to look helps.
4. Put the real thing on the table. Smell a few blueberries or a slice of peach, then smell the coffee. This is how professional panels calibrate, with a reference right in front of them, and it is the idea behind pairing coffee with food.
5. Keep tasting as it cools, and compare it with a second coffee if you can. A note that hides in one cup is often obvious next to a coffee that lacks it.

If you find something that is not on the bag, trust it. The notes are a starting point, and your own word for the smell is just as real as ours.