How to Savour Your Coffee

HOW TO SAVOUR COFFEE?

There is only one rule to savour coffee properly: use your senses! There are three stages to a tasting: visual examination, olfactory examination and gustatory examination.

First of all, here is a little advice before you start your tasting. Rinse your mouth with a little water.

TASTING A COFFEE: THE OLFACTORY EXAMINATION

To begin, you will have to use your sense of smell. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to discover the aromas of your coffee only by smelling it. There are two ways to conduct an olfactory test:

• “Dry” is the first stage, this allows you to feel the intensity of the aromas. Here, no water is used, the ground coffee is appreciated at its true value. Difficult to do with our capsules, but you can pierce the lid and it will still work in the machine.
• Wet or extract: make your extraction. First smell the aromas released by your drink and then stir your coffee to appreciate new aromas.

THE COFFEE TASTE TEST

Now it’s time to enjoy your coffee! And your taste buds are going to be a great ally! You will be able to analyse the body (the sensation of fullness in the mouth), the aromatic intensity, the acidity, the bitterness or the sweetness.

Tasting your espresso in 3 sips

Tip before you start: drink it within two minutes of extraction, as the bitterness develops as the coffee cools. 

• The first sip allows you to analyse the body (mouthfeel) and crema of your espresso. The crema is the top layer of an espresso, similar to a foam, and is composed of the emulsified fats of the coffee grind.
• After 20 seconds, you can take your second sip and define the intensity of bitterness, sugar, acidity. You can rate it from 1 to 10.
• With the last sip, you can analyse and detect the aromas with the famous aroma wheel.

Tasting a coffee, the gentle method 4 steps :

• Your first task is to analyse the body of your coffee.
• The second is to determine the different flavours (through saliva). There are 5 flavours: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami (savoury).
• The third step is to find the aromas in your cup.
• The last step allows you to determine whether your drink is more pungent, hot, warm or astringent. These are called trigeminal sensations, from the trigeminal nerve that sends this information to the brain.

At Espressopedia we have provided information about all of our coffees on the website. All of our coffees come direct from Italy and you will find additional information on the boxes which contain the capsules.  This guide is help you understand how we describe our coffees but at the end of the day it is your taste buds that matter, so go ahead, have an espresso.