Coffee Smarter: Tasting Coffee Interlude.

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Topic: Tasting Coffee
Guest: Siri Simran Khalsa, Lofty Coffee Company
Title: Director of Coffee
Connect: @loftycoffeeco • www.loftycoffee.com

Coffee Smarter is off this week, but I didn’t want to put a pause in your Coffee Smarter journey. This potentially new to you podcast episode excerpt comes from the R!WC archives and features Siri Simran Khalsa, one of my favorite Coffee Smarter podcast guests. She is also one of the thought leaders—a term I heard at a cafe pop-up last weekend—behind the San Diego Coffee Network.

The lists below were originally shared here on Roast! West Coast on March 10, 2022. Link below.

If you want to taste coffee like a pro, follow these steps:

Smell the dry beans before grinding.
Pour hot water over the grinds. A crust will form.
Break the crust using a coffee cupping spoon* to push back the grinds in the coffee cupping bowl.*
Smell the wet aroma. Really get your nose close and take in the scents wafting around you.
Use the spoon to SLURP some coffee. Slurping will help you to spread coffee across your entire palate. The air flowing in will spread out the flavors across all of your taste budsPRO-TIP: Taste as the coffee cools to avoid burning the tongue and to better identify subtle, nuanced flavors and/or off-flavors that you may not be able to process when the coffee is to hot.

*These are some official cupping tools, but a soup spoon and small soup bowl could work too…Just saying.

While you are tasting, you are looking for the following qualities in addition to flavors and after-taste flavors:

Acidity
Body
Sweetness
Bitterness

Download a pdf of the SCAA Cupping Form.

There are a lot of tools to help you in this process. If you’re just starting out, the coffee flavor wheel is the big one. Start in the middle and identify more general flavor characteristics and work your way out. I really like this one from Counter Culture Coffee.

Taster’s Flavor Wheel ©Counter Culture Coffee.

A new-to-me tool is an aroma chart. Siri was talking about the Le Nez du Café Revelation kit, which has charts, descriptions, and the aromas themselves distilled in alcohol to refer to. The Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) also has its version of an aroma kit. Both are pretty expensive. I’ll be starting with this chart I found online.

It isn’t as advanced as the other aroma wheels but I’m just getting started at including scents into my tasting intentions.

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Check out the original episode’s newsletter post and the full episode recording with 15 additional minutes of podcasting gold here:

R!WC INDUSTRY PARTNERS

R!WC podcasts are supported by Mostra Coffee Company. There is a rumor floating around (via Sandiegoville) that Mostra will be opening a new cafe this spring. I’ve reached out for confirmation. In the meantime, check out this Crème Brûlée Latte on the Mostra spring menu.