Old cafes who often drink coffee can taste every taste contained in coffee and tell it in a leisurely manner. But it’s my turn, I can’t drink anything except bitterness. Are the big guys pretending to be elegant and bragging? Does the taste of coffee really have so many "layers"?
If you like it, please collect it first~ and chat and brag in the future, and you can be as tasteful as a big shot.
How does the sense of hierarchy come about?
Coffee beans are probably one of the most complex seeds in the world. There are about 300 kinds of aroma substances in raw beans. carbohydrates , proteins, oils, organic acids, fenugreekine, etc. are the main ingredients that form aroma.
Raw beans need to be roasted into cooked beans before they can be drunk. After the aroma substances in coffee green beans are heated to a certain extent, complex degradation and polymerization reactions begin to occur, resulting in richer volatile aromas, with a flavor of up to thousands; sometimes coffee smells much more fragrant than it tastes, which is also the reason.
Of course, not all fragrances can be perceived by the taste, and they are too complicated to describe them, and the fragrance is generally classified. For example, American fine coffee association (SCAA) reduces the common coffee aroma to "coffee 36 fragrance".
Click to see the larger image
Click to see the larger image
There is also a category of coffee fragrance in China. Generally, we often use this "coffee fragrance table", which replaces the fragrance reference with common flower and fruit foods in China, which is relatively localized.
domestic coffee aroma table
In the training of professional baristas, one is the liquid containing a certain smell in a small bottle. Baristas need to distinguish and identify these fragrances and form olfactory memories, so that when tasting a certain piece of coffee, they can be described in common language, and it is also convenient for consumers to select coffee based on their own flavor preferences.
Judge which flavor you prefer?
Just like tasting tea, tasting cigar or red wine, the taste of coffee also needs to be "tasted" and perceived. After the coffee is in the mouth, the taste will turn and change as the temperature of the coffee liquid decreases in the mouth.
Taste different coffees and find out the good taste you like. Each brand, each place of origin, type of coffee beans, and even different ways of processing and roasting raw beans can produce a refreshing fragrance, which is also the fun of drinking coffee.
Similar to drinking tea, the tea fragrance is divided into different stages of the fragrance of "top notes, middle notes, and bottom notes". Coffee also has this characteristic, and the change in taste is the "layer".
How to taste coffee in a newbie?
is very simple~ When you get a pack of coffee, we first look at the packaging. The packaging generally indicates the origin of the coffee beans, the processing and roasting method of the raw beans. These factors have a huge impact on flavor. For details, please refer to my previous column.
yegaschefei as an example, the flavor description says: jasmine, citrus, apricot peach . By checking the information, we know that Jegachef is an African coffee bean, and the aroma of fruit flower is the characteristic of African beans. The washing method is more obvious and the acidity is presented, which has a pure and bright taste.
Then we can taste it. The faint, light fragrance of flowers when we first entered the mouth, as if the aroma of coffee melted in the water. The middle part is obvious citrus sourness, and the Yegaschefei is almost unable to taste bitter coffee, but it has obvious green tangerine or orange peel acid, while the latter part is slightly astringent of apricot kernel or green peach.
When you carefully taste the fragrance on the flavor card, even if you understand this coffee, of course, you still need a little association to meet each flavor marked on it.The treatment details of
coffee are different, and even the same coffee tastes are different: for example, it is also Yegaschefei, if the apple and grape sour are marked, it is completely different from the citrus sour taste we just drank, and it requires us to feel it carefully.
Deeply roasted coffee beans have low acidity, mellow and bitterness, mainly baking and spice flavors, and will have a smoky and bitter taste. For example, this Mantenin coffee , let’s first look at its flavor card:
We can see that moderate roasting retains a certain amount of acidity, and it is not too bitter. The mellow taste is like a thick slurry, which is a kind of unsweetened dark chocolate . After the hot cocoa-like smoldering fragrance melts, the aftertaste exudes a unique herbal fragrance and aging woody smell, which is the unique characteristic of tropical rainforest coffee beans.
Therefore, the flavor card on the coffee packaging is not a promotion by the merchant, it is expressed through professional terms (that is, the American standard 36 flavors and domestic flavor table) and it will be of great help to us tasting this coffee.
How to brew coffee with a strong sense of layering?
In addition to the changes in the flavor of the coffee beans themselves, the way of brewing coffee can also enrich the levels of coffee.
☆ Tips for grinding coffee beans: Generally, we call coffee particles larger than 0.85mm coarse powder, while particles smaller than 0.25mm are called extremely fine powder. The more fine powder, the more thorough the extraction, the stronger the coffee taste; the powder is too coarse and it is not enough to extract. The grinding rate of No. 20 screen with a sieve rate of 70-75% is more suitable for hand-brewing coffee.
☆Multiple-stage extraction: Many newbies brew coffee is like making milk powder. After filling the cup with boiling water, the taste is dull and the aftertaste is light. This is why it requires sectional water injection.
The water temperature of hand-rinsed is usually around 86 to 93°C, and the gouache ratio is 1:15. Taking the commonly used three-stage water injection as an example, the first time the water injection is filled, the extracted coffee liquid has a strong acidity, a high aroma, and a green feeling. The coffee liquid extracted from the second water injection is the strongest, with a clear mellow and sweet feeling. When the third water injection is filled, the coffee has been extracted almost the same. At this time, it mainly presents a "after-flavor" and is not easy to perceive, such as woody aroma, apricot kernel flavor, vanilla flavor, etc., which will appear at this time.
Every time you inject water, it brings a distinctive and distinctive flavor. After mixing the three coffee liquids, the taste is balanced and you can taste the twists and changes. This is how layering comes about.
