Tasting coffee properly means splitting the experience into named parts and describing what you perceive, separately from whether you liked it. The Specialty Coffee Association calls those two jobs descriptive assessment, which “objectively records sensory attributes of coffee, including aroma, flavor, texture, and aftertaste using standardized language”, and affective assessment, which “captures an evaluator’s impression of coffee quality, related to their personal preference or the preferences of their market” (SCA Coffee Value Assessment). Get them the wrong way round and every note you write is just “nice” with extra words. The named parts are fragrance, aroma, flavor, aftertaste, acidity, sweetness and mouthfeel, and each one is defined below in the words of the standard that defines it.
Nobody at this site has cupped, scored or measured any of the coffees named on this page, and no tasting note on this page is ours. Everything descriptive here is quoted from a published standard or from a roaster. That is a change from the earlier version, and the next section says exactly what changed.
Table of Contents
What this page used to say, and why it was wrong
- It presented invented tasting notes as facts about whole countries. A table assigned Ethiopia “Citrus, Floral, Berry” with “High” acidity and “Light” body, Sumatra “Earthy, Spicy, Herbal” with “Low” acidity and “Full” body, and so on for Colombia and Brazil. No source was given for any cell, and nobody here tasted a single one of those coffees. A country is not a flavour: altitude, variety, processing and roast move a cup further than a border does. The table is gone and has not been replaced with a better-sourced version of the same idea.
- A second table rated brewing methods for “Strength” and “Body”, calling cold brew “Mild” and espresso “Very Strong”, again with no source. Strength is a function of how much coffee you use, not of the device. That table is gone too.
- It reproduced a summary of the Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel without naming it. A “Coffee Tasting Wheel Guide Table” listed sensory categories and descriptors with no attribution. The wheel is a specific, copyrighted, jointly owned document, and this page now names its owners, its licence and where it came from.
- It said cupping and tasting are the same thing. The opening line ran “Coffee tasting, also known as ‘cupping'”. They are not synonyms. In the SCA’s terms, “tasting” is the general activity and “the term ‘tasting’ encompasses cupping and other forms of tasting, such as tasting coffee from a batch brew”. Cupping is one specific method, described below.
- It gave an unsourced number for specialty coffee. The page said specialty coffee “often scores above 80 on a 100-point scale by coffee experts”. No source was cited. The SCA’s current standards define specialty coffee without a score at all, as “A coffee or coffee experience that is recognized for its distinctive attributes and, because of these attributes, has significant extra value in the marketplace”. The number has been removed rather than re-sourced to something that looks official.
- Its outbound links were stale and three internal links burned a redirect. It pointed at
scaa.org, which is the association’s former name, and at anncausa.org/About-CoffeeURL after the National Coffee Association moved its consumer site toaboutcoffee.org. Three internal links used a/coffee-tips/path prefix that this site’s URLs do not have. All are corrected. - The food-pairing section has moved out. This page carried a “Perfect Coffee and Food Combinations” section that duplicated a separate article. Pairing now lives entirely on coffee and food pairing. This page is about method; that one is about application.
The seven words, defined by the people who defined them
These definitions are quoted from SCA Standard 102-2024, Coffee Value Assessment: Sample Preparation and Tasting Mechanics, section 4.4. They are worth reading slowly, because most of the confusion in amateur tasting notes is two of these being mistaken for each other.
| Section | SCA definition (verbatim) |
|---|---|
| Fragrance | “The orthonasal olfactory perception of the coffee grounds prior to brewing (i.e., the smell of the coffee grounds).” |
| Aroma | “The orthonasal olfactory perception of the coffee brew, assessed at two moments: right after brewing and while the crust is broken (i.e., the smell of the brew).” |
| Flavor | “The perception coming from both the taste of the brew and the brew’s retronasal olfactory component, while the brew is in the mouth. It is perceived as a single ‘flavor’ impression, as the brain combines the different sensory inputs.” |
| Aftertaste | “The perception coming from both the taste and the retronasal olfactory component caused by the remnants of the brew inside the mouth and throat, after the brew has been ejected or swallowed.” |
| Acidity | “The perception of sour taste provoked by the brew, which may vary in intensity and character.” |
| Sweetness | “The perception of gustatory or retronasal sweetness provoked by the brew.” |
| Mouthfeel | “The tactile perception of the brew while it is in the mouth, excluding the temperature perception. It encompasses the brew’s weight and viscosity, its texture, and other tactile properties such as astringency (mouth-drying property).” |
Two of those definitions do most of the work. Fragrance and aroma are both smells — one of the dry grounds, one of the wet brew — and both are orthonasal, meaning you get them by breathing in through the nose. Flavor and aftertaste are both composites, mixing taste on the tongue with retronasal smell, which the standard describes as reaching the nose “from the back of the mouth cavity, as we breathe out”. That is why coffee tastes of almost nothing when you have a cold, and why the trick of holding your nose and letting go mid-sip is such a convincing demonstration.
The other frequent mix-up is acidity against sourness as a fault, and body against strength. Acidity in the standard is simply the perception of sour taste and carries no verdict; how much of it you get is strongly shaped by roast level, which we cover with its source on coffee roast levels rather than restating here. Mouthfeel is a tactile property — thickness, texture, astringency — and has nothing to do with how much coffee you put in.
What cupping actually is
Cupping is a defined procedure, not a mood. The SCA defines it as “A method for the sensory assessment of coffee, which involves tasting several cups per coffee sample, using a different set of coffee beans for each cup, which is ground and brewed independently.” The separate cups are the point: they are how a taster detects that one bag is not uniform.
The mechanics, all from SCA Standard 102-2024:
- Dose by mass, to the vessel. “the mass of coffee per cup is calculated at a ratio of 8.25 g of coffee per 150 mL of vessel capacity”, weighed “using a scale with 0.1 g or higher accuracy”. That works out at 55 g of coffee per litre of water — the same figure this site uses as its house brewing reference, about 1:18 by weight. Where the standard allows batch brewing instead of cupping, it specifies “a brew ratio of 55–60 g of coffee per liter of water”.
- Grind coarser than filter, and grind each cup separately. “The coffee used for cupping shall be ground so that 70–75% of the grinds pass through the 20 US standard mesh sieve (850 µm aperture); this is slightly coarser than typically used for paper filter drip brewing.”
- Smell the dry grounds first. “As soon as it is practical, the fragrance of the samples shall be evaluated by sniffing the dry grounds.”
- Pour hot water to the rim and leave it alone. “water at 93 ± 3°C shall be poured into each cup to the rim”. A “crust” forms on top and “shall be left unbroken for 3-5 minutes”. Our page on the best temperature for French press coffee carries the general brewing temperature range and its source.
- Break the crust and smell it. “Breaking of the crust should be done by stirring the crust approximately three times, while the vapors released by this motion are sniffed and assessed.” Then the grounds and oils on the surface are skimmed off and discarded.
- Wait, then slurp. “the brew should be allowed to cool to about 70°C before ‘liquoring’ begins”, and a spoonful “should be slurped into the mouth in such a way as to cover as much area as possible, especially the tongue and upper palate”, then ejected. “Different rounds of liquoring (at least three) should be done to assess the different cupping sections as the coffee cools down below body temperature.”
That last instruction is the single most useful thing a home taster can copy. A coffee at 70 °C and the same coffee at room temperature are not the same experience, and professional practice is to taste it at least three times on the way down rather than forming a view from the first hot sip. The slurping is not showmanship either: spraying the brew across the palate and aerating it is what drives the retronasal smell that “flavor” is half made of.
Why “notes of blueberry” does not mean there is any blueberry in it
This is the question the old version of this page never answered, and it is the one most readers actually have. Nothing is added to a bag of whole-bean coffee. When a roaster writes “blueberry” on the bag, they are naming a reference for a perception.
The SCA says so in its own definitions. A “sensory category example” is “A set of suggested ingredients or products that exemplify the sensory character of a category in the Flavor Wheel, for tasters to become familiarized with each category’s distinctive character” (SCA Standard 103-2024, Descriptive Assessment, section 4.2). The blueberry is a shared calibration object, held up so that two people who have never met can mean the same thing by a word.
That vocabulary has a documented origin. The World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon “identifies 110 flavor, aroma, and texture attributes present in coffee” and “provides references for measuring their intensity”; it was “Created at the Sensory Analysis Center at Kansas State University”, and “Lexicon 2.0 was published October 2017”. The lexicon is in turn “the basis for a revised Coffee Flavor Taster’s Wheel”.
The wheel itself is the SCA and WCR’s joint document. In the SCA’s words, “Originally published in 1995, one of the most iconic resources in the coffee industry, the Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel, has been the industry standard for over two decades”, and its 2016 revision was made “in collaboration with World Coffee Research (WCR)”, whose lexicon “is the product of dozens of professional sensory panelists, scientists, coffee buyers, and roasting companies collaborating via WCR and SCA” (SCA). It is licensed “under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License”, which is why this page describes it and links to it rather than redrawing it.
How to read it: the inner rings are broad categories and the outer rings are specific. The SCA’s descriptive standard puts it plainly — “each descriptor in the inner or middle circle of the Flavor Wheel also represents a ‘flavor category’ that encompasses descriptors in the outer circle of the wheel”, so that “while ‘citrus fruit’ may be used as its own descriptive term, it might also encompass other flavors such as lemon, lime, orange, and grapefruit”. Start in the middle and only move outward as far as you are actually confident. “Fruity” that you can defend beats “blueberry” that you cannot.
Where the flavour came from before you tasted it
Two production decisions shift a cup more reliably than origin does, and both are documented by the National Coffee Association rather than by us.
Processing. On the natural or dry method, the NCA writes that “With effective harvesting, the natural process can produce interesting coffees with a fuller body and uniquely sweet and fruity flavor profile”, adding that such coffees “may have more of a ‘wine’ or fermented taste to them”. On the washed method: “Washed coffees may have floral, sour and/or citrus notes, and their flavor often is described as ‘clean.'” On the honey process, “The sugary mucilage caramelizes during the drying process, preserving some sweetness” and “leaving more mucilage on the bean results in a sweeter taste” (NCA, coffee processing).
Roast level. Roast moves perceived acidity in a direction the NCA states in both directions, and we cover that with the quotation on coffee roast levels. It is not restated here, because a site that says the same thing twice will eventually say it two different ways.
If you want to taste a single farm’s character rather than a blender’s, brewing single-origin coffee at home is the practical companion to this page, and house blend coffee explains what a blender is doing when they deliberately smooth that character out.
A tasting you can actually run at home
You do not need a cupping table. You need two coffees, one method, and the discipline to change only one thing at a time.
- Taste two coffees side by side, never one alone. A single cup gives you an opinion; a pair gives you a difference, and differences are what a palate is actually built out of.
- Hold everything constant except the coffee. Same grinder setting, same dose at 55 g per litre of water weighed to 0.1 g, same water, same temperature, same vessel, same time. Note that a coffee “cup” is 6 fluid ounces, not 8, and that stronger means more coffee rather than less.
- Smell the dry grounds before you brew, then the wet coffee, then taste. Fragrance, aroma, flavour — in that order, because that is the order they exist in.
- Taste three times as it cools. Hot, warm and near room temperature. Write a separate line each time.
- Write down the section, not just the adjective. “More acidity than B, similar mouthfeel, longer aftertaste” is a usable note. “Smooth” is not.
- Record the roast date. A note about a coffee is a note about a coffee on a date, and a bag six weeks old is not the coffee the roaster shipped.
Keep the notes somewhere you will reread them. The value is not in any single entry, it is in noticing three months later that the coffees you keep buying again share a section — and that the word you reach for is nearly always in the same part of the wheel.
The scale, grinder and kettle this assumes are covered, with nothing claimed as tested, on our page about brewing tools and accessories. When you want to put the coffee next to something to eat, that is a different problem with a different evidence base, and it is on coffee and food pairing.
