Taste and texture: the most overlooked key elements of coffee

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We often use our sense of smell and taste to judge the aroma and sweetness of coffee, as the main basis for judging whether a cup of coffee is delicious and mellow, but in fact we often ignore the influence of "body" on a cup of coffee, that is, the sense of touch other than taste and smell. If you open a pack of biscuits today and the moment you bite it, it tastes like a soft cookie, you will definitely want to spit it out reflexively, because it is not made by Jobs, and it is likely that the biscuits have been damp and spoiled for a long time.

Back to coffee, although we don’t think that the coffee is bad when we drink coffee that is as thin as water, we usually prefer rich, smooth and thick coffee with the same aroma intensity, just like latte with dense milk foam is always more pleasing than au lait with pure milk.

The sense of happiness brought by the thick, smooth feeling and sweetness of being wrapped has always been an irresistible instinct of human beings. After all, living in the primitive wild environment, the smoothness of fat and the sweetness of carbohydrates represent precious sources of calories. Even though we no longer need to hunt in the wild, the memory written in our genes still dominates our preferences.

Hot milk whipped to the right temperature can not only dissolve lactose to increase sweetness, but most importantly, it creates dense foam after mixing with air, which can make the whole cup of latte smooth, thick, fluffy and not greasy, making people want to take one sip after another, greatly increasing our overall experience of coffee. This is the important "texture" provided by the sense of touch, and together with the "aroma" and "taste", it is a complete flavor experience.

What about black coffee? How can we practice judging the difference in taste of black coffee without milk?

First of all, we can first recognize which words can help us describe the taste, light, refreshing, smooth, rough, enveloping, soup-like, silky, dry, stimulating... We can use more common objects in life to help our descriptions be more specific. In the process of deciding which adjective to use to express coffee, it helps us to distinguish and remember different degrees of taste differences.

When eating, you can eat more slowly and feel the movement and churning of food in your mouth. Is it hard, crispy, soft or sticky? Back to liquid beverages such as coffee, it may not be easy to easily brew different tastes with the same beans, so it may be easier to buy ready-made beverages. You can buy whole milk, low-fat milk, and skim milk to taste. You may let the milk stay in your mouth for a longer time and use your tongue to churn it to feel the difference in viscosity and smoothness under different fats.

If you don't like drinking milk, you can consider going to a milk tea shop to order full sugar, half sugar, or no sugar iced black tea . You can clearly feel the lubrication, weight, and modification that sweetness can bring to the drink. You will find that in addition to the weight difference in taste, sweetness will greatly affect your evaluation of flavor. Sugar-free black tea usually appears more bitter and astringent. The friction caused by the lack of sugar can easily make you feel that the flavor and aftertaste seem to be shorter? Usually after drinking something richer and fuller, people will go back. No. Go! This is why some people like darker roasting more and more, because darker roasting usually provides us with a fuller, rounder and layered flavor and taste. As long as you extract it correctly, it can provide a richer return.

In the commercial market dominated by Nordic and North American coffee, aroma and acidity have always been the most important evaluation items, but this does not mean that the performance of taste and texture does not need to be taken seriously. On the contrary, with the increasingly advanced and popular post-processing technology, there will be more and more coffee beans with distinctive aromas, and the final key to winning and getting high scores will be whether the taste and texture are good or not. Is the sweetness under the unrestrained fruity aroma supportive? Is there a delicate taste to balance the rich floral aroma? A floral aroma without delicate layers may even make people feel that it tastes more like toilet air freshener the more they drink it.

Article reprinted from: Burning Wood Coffee Studio

Image source: Internet

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