I’ve got my score sheet right here in front of me. It says (and I am not making this up)—banana, papaya, pineapple, raspberry, mangos … tropical … (and then you can see I am getting a little excited, because my handwriting is more hurried) “so sweet and smooth … astonishing …” (then I lose my professionalism altogether) “Velvety pinks and magentas!”
Would you guess I was describing coffee? Yeah, me neither. But this is the sort of thing I sometimes come across in my travels: a truly unique coffee. For skeptics here’s a statistic: brewed coffee typically contains over 800 different organic compounds, compared with around 200 in a glass of wine. Each compound has unique flavor, from the nasty (ashes, mold, animal hide) to the divine (Meyer lemon, honey, baker’s chocolate). What marks a great coffee is an intriguing combination of positive attributes and a lack of negative ones.
It was in Ethiopia that I found the coffee that caused my little “pink and magenta” orgasm, in the middle of scoring coffees for a national competition. Now, strictly speaking, “velvety pinks and magentas!” is not a technically acceptable term. You might be surprised at the level of detail that goes into scoring these coffees. Coffees are evaluated on flavor, aftertaste, acidity (not always a bad thing!), body, cleanliness (really!), balance, sweetness, fragrance and aroma (not technically the same thing!), and … well, you get the idea. If you are interested in what a score sheet looks like (and if you are interested … my goodness, dear, what kind of hopeless nerd are you?!) you can see one version (though not the one I was using) here.
The aroma notes I listed above (papaya, mango) are the kinds of notes professional cuppers will often make on their score sheets, though admittedly those particular notes are quite rare. Writing down colors is less common. It’s supposed to be scientific, after all. Sometimes I have to remind myself of this. Otherwise I might end up with drawings of race cars for, say, a kick-ass Blue Batak Sumatra; a series of angrily sketched frowny faces for defective commercial coffee from … (name redacted to protect the purveyors of defective commercial coffee); and Keatsian odes to delicate Guatemalan beauties (“O, thou still unravished Huehuetenango of quietness ...”).
Usually, though, I just stick to my numerical scores. I swear. Besides, giving a coffee a 9.5 on aftertaste is about the same as writing a love poem to it, considering what that implies about the quality of the coffee.
All this is just to find coffees that people are going to like. Generally we don’t speak of people evaluating their double Americanos based on balance and fragrance. But here’s the catch: they are evaluating it that way. They just don’t know it. People know what they like; they just sometimes lack the vocabulary to explain it.
And what do people like? Above all, they like sweetness and a smooth mouth feel. Market research backs this up. Also—duh. This is why people put cream and sugar (or soy and Splenda, natch) in their coffee. People also like a good aftertaste, a pleasing snap (“good” acidity), and an interesting or comforting aroma profile. The fact that they don’t break it down that way doesn’t mean that it can’t be broken down that way.
