5 tips to help you use the coffee flavour wheel

1: Enjoy the beauty

Soak up the colours and the words and enjoy it for what it is; an artistic interpretation of coffee flavour.

 2: Taste your coffee

Don’t just drink your coffee, taste it. Stop and really think about what you are tasting. Smell the aroma, sip the coffee and let it coat your tongue. Flavour is defined as a combination of taste and smell so it’s important to smell and taste the coffee when it is hot, warm and cool. Now take a good look at the wheel.

 3: Begin in the centre

Start at the centre of the wheel and work outward. General taste descriptions are near the centre, and they get more specific as you work to the outer circle.

For example, you might taste fruit notes when tasting a coffee from Ethiopia. Moving through the ‘fruity’ section of the wheel, you are given a choice: does the fruitiness remind you of berries, dried fruit, citrus fruit, or something else? If you decide ‘citrus fruit’, you can then further refine the description: is it ‘grapefruit’, ‘orange’, ‘lemon’ or ‘lime’? Having identified which, you can move back to the centre and start again, with another flavour note, until you feel the description of the coffee, on a very basic level, is complete.

 4: Talk about it

The use of an industry-standard wheel means that all coffee professionals and coffee lovers can use a common document, have it in our tasting labs and cafes, and base our communication on a shared language. If you want to discuss coffee, the flavour wheel is a great starting point. Our baristas love talking about coffee and sharing their thoughts about flavour profiles and their favourite origins.

 5: Colour sense

Our visual sense is strongly connected with our other senses, and the way foods look give us important information to how they are likely to taste. For this reason, we often use visual terms to describe flavour: a coffee can taste “bright” or “red” or “green”. Keeping this in mind, we should pay attention to the colours on the wheel, linking the terms with colours that represent the attribute clearly. This might help a struggling coffee taster find a description. If you say “it tastes like a red fruit of some kind”, you can scan the red-coloured attributes on the wheel. “Something brown” might send you to the left side of the wheel, indicating the awareness of spice or grain notes.

It takes time and practice, but if you truly want to appreciate your coffee on a deeper level, understanding the coffee flavour wheel is a good place to start.