Tasting Notes Are Not Flavourings
· 1 min read
A bag that says blackcurrant does not have blackcurrant in it, and understanding what those words are for makes them useful rather than annoying.
Tasting notes are an attempt to describe a coffee's character using reference points most people share. Nobody added fruit. What the roaster is saying is that the acidity in this coffee resembles the acidity of that fruit, in the same way a wine described as flinty contains no rocks.
They are also written by someone whose palate has been trained on hundreds of coffees a week, tasting at a specific temperature and dilution, usually without milk. Your cup, at a different temperature, brewed differently, will present those characteristics less sharply. That is not a failure on either side.
Using them practically
The direction is more useful than the specific fruit. Notes clustered around citrus, berries and florals mean a lighter roast with higher acidity. Notes around chocolate, nuts and caramel mean a darker roast with more body. That single distinction predicts whether you will like a bag far better than whether you can taste blackcurrant.
If you find the vocabulary alienating, the shortcut is to ignore it and ask for something that tastes like the last coffee you enjoyed. Any decent bar can translate. The words exist to make an invisible product describable, not to build a wall, and the ones using them as a wall are telling you something about themselves rather than about the coffee.
