Maybe you’ve had this experience before … you walk into a specialty coffee shop to be met by a barista who’s waiting with bated breath to regale you with their utterly impressive vocabulary of tasting notes. Ah, this Colombian features notes of plum compote, spiced Chinese white pear, a sparkling acidity, hints of cacao nib and dried lavender layered with ginger snap and a bouquet of Yuzu rind and Elder flower. Amazing! But when this other-worldly coffee arrives in a paper cup with Thomas scribbled along the side (you’re Thomas in this example), you eagerly take the first sip and think, “Ah, I get a note of, uh, coffee.”

What about the plum compote? The Yuzu rind? Sparkling acidity? Was this nothing more than a lie? Have I, Thomas, been deceived by this coffee establishment?!

Taste, you see, is tricky. Not to say the barista in this scenario is wrong, or that you somehow are unable to unlock the full complexities of the coffee you were provided, but rather, taste and our ability to understand and describe it is impacted by numerous factors all coming into play simultaneously. In this article, we’ll review a sampling of those factors. Some you can control, and some you can’t (flippin’ genetics, man), but your understanding of these factors will undoubtedly make you a better taster.

Experience

When we drink coffee, we create responses in our brain that attempt to associate that sensation with everything we’ve experienced before. It sounds obvious, then, that our ability to associate coffee with another flavor requires that we’ve experienced that flavor previously. This accessibility factor is a big point of contention for me. As a coffee professional, if I can’t assume that you’ve experienced a sensation previously (think Yuzu rind), then how could my description possibly be relatable to my customers? 
Now think about blueberries. What does that mean to you? You might think of a ripe, sweet blueberry while I think of a tart blueberry. For this reason, coffee professionals often taste and share information as a means of calibrating their taste perception and their language. This is also why resources like the World Coffee Research’s Sensory Lexicon Guide exists.

Lastly, there’s the experience we have with coffee, itself. The more exposure we have to coffee, the more likely we are to pick up subtle differences between multiple coffees. Want to be a better coffee taster? Drink more coffee!

Environment

Under what environmental conditions are you drinking coffee? In your neighborhood coffee shop, filled with the aroma of freshly baked pastries, cappuccinos and other coffee drinks? Alone in a dark, silent room? Your surrounding environment can shape your ability to access flavors and aromas. Rocking out to Slayer dialed up to 11? How about Celine Dion playing gently in the background? Difference experiences!

Context matters. It matters in our ability to isolate and perceive flavors. And it matters in the sense that other, competing stimuli can affect our ability to taste. There have also been attempts to study the effects of color and flavor. Was your cup blue? Red? You may detect more sweetness, or bitterness, as a result.

Expectations

When you walk into Mammoth Espresso and take a look over our coffee menu, you’ll find tasting notes and relevant details (at least we think they’re relevant) next to each coffee in our lineup. Why do we do this? In a way, this information is intended to help you evaluate your coffee choices and form a preference without actually sampling every individual coffee.

Truth be told, though, we also do this to set the stage for what you’ll experience when you drink the coffee. Accessible, pleasant and accurate descriptions provide a reference point for you to mirror your own experiences. If your barista mentions that a particular coffee has a dazzling hit of citrus complemented by cinnamon and mulling spice, guess what you’re likely to pick up on?

Because our expectations can be such a strong influence on our taste perception, it’s common for coffee professionals to “blind taste” coffee samples in order to remove this bias.

Anatomy, Physiology and the Human Brain

Okay, we’re getting a bit sciency here (my scientist wife loves when I describe things as “sciency”). Put simply, loads of things occurring within our bodies at any given time impact the ways in which we taste and the perceived intensity of those experiences. For instance, are you high stressed? (Omg we are all so stressed these days.) Your taste buds, along with numerous other bodily functions, are compromised when they become the target of stress hormones. In particular, the perception of sweetness is affected. 

Factors such as poor hydration or lack or sleep also impair your sensory processes, and studies have shown that age can diminish our ability to smell. Exercising regularly can counteract the effect of aging, however, and staying hydrated and getting sufficient sleep can ensure our sensory organs are in good working order.

Brain bi-laterization is, no joke, one of my favorite topics, and soon I’d love to devote a whole article to just this. Here’s the quick version. We experience emotions and nonverbal memories when we taste, which is a function of the brain’s right hemisphere. Over in the left hemisphere, we apply rational thinking and put to use our language skills. So when tasked with tasting and evaluating coffee, our right brain is filled with emotions and past memories while our left brain is seeking the literal words to describe this experience. Better tasters, then, are often those that can pass information along easily between right and left hemispheres of the brain. This is done by the corpus callosum, the region of the brain that regulates between right and left brain functions.

So who among us is fortunate enough to have superior corpus callosum function? It turns out that children who learn to play music strengthen the connection in this part of the brain by performing tasks that require right and left brain operation at a critical time in brain development. I knew those piano lessons would come in handy!

With the complexities of our emotional right brain needing to relay information over to our language-adept left brain, it’s helpful if we can practice a bit of patience and “sit with” our taste experiences before trying to force the language that describes them.

Genetics

And lastly, genetics. Ah, the hand we’re dealt. Basically, each of the previous factors can be changed, overcome, fine-tuned or otherwise accounted for to improve our tasting abilities. But then there’s those stubborn genetics. We are pre-determined to be more or less sensitive to certain tastes, and are equipped with greater or fewer taste receptors due to our genetic makeup. Some of us got the short end, but a lucky few were born to be supertasters!

And if you’ve made it all the way down here to the end of this article, I’ve got a fun reward for you. Right now at Mammoth Espresso, we’ve got 100 strips of paper coated with a compound called phenylthiocarbamide (or PTC). When these PTC strips are placed on your tongue you may experience a) nothing at all (whomp, whomp), b) a mild bitterness, or c) an intensely unpleasant taste. This would classify you as either a nontaster, taster or supertaster, respectively. It’s a fun little exercise, so the next time you’re at the shop ask your barista for, “one of them supertaster things,” and we’ll hook you up.