Coffee tasting vocabulary: every cupping attribute explained

Good tasting notes answer three separate questions:

1. What is it like? The descriptor: jasmine, clementine, milk chocolate, black tea.
2. How strong is it? The intensity. The SCA's descriptive form rates each section on a 0 to 15 scale. World Coffee Research's Sensory Lexicon defines 110 attributes and gives reference samples for intensity on a 0 to 15 scale.
3. How good is it? Your impression of quality. This is subjective, and the SCA treats it as a separate, "affective" assessment.

Keeping these apart is the single biggest step from casual to skilled tasting. A coffee can have intense acidity that you dislike, or delicate acidity you love. In the SCA's words, "Intensity does not imply quality."

Fragrance is the smell of the ground coffee while it is still dry. Aroma is the smell once hot water is added: first of the steeping crust, then the burst as the crust is broken. The SCA 102 standard defines both as orthonasal smell, meaning smell taken in through the nose as you breathe in.

Fragrance often tells you a coffee's broad family (fruity, floral, nutty, chocolatey, spicy) before you taste it. Aroma at the break is usually the most intense smell of the whole cupping.

SCA 102 defines flavor as "the perception coming from both the taste of the brew and the brew's retronasal olfactory component, while the brew is in the mouth." In other words, flavor is the five basic tastes plus smell, perceived from inside your mouth as you breathe out. That is why a blocked nose makes coffee taste flat, and why cuppers slurp.

Flavor descriptors are the words most people mean by "tasting notes": stone fruit, citrus, berry, caramel, cocoa, nuts, florals, spices. A flavor wheel organizes them from general to specific.

Aftertaste is what remains after the coffee has been spat out or swallowed, again combining taste and retronasal smell. The classic SCAA protocol calls it "the length of positive flavor (taste and aroma) qualities emanating from the back of the palate." Note how long it lasts (short, medium, lingering) and whether it stays pleasant or turns bitter, drying or ashy.

In SCA 102, acidity is "the perception of sour taste provoked by the brew, which may vary in intensity and character." The older protocol describes it as "brightness" when favorable and "sour" when unfavorable, and notes that at its best acidity "contributes to a coffee's liveliness, sweetness, and fresh-fruit character."

Two things to keep in mind:

• Intensity and quality are different. The SCAA protocol's own example: a Kenya coffee expected to be high in acidity and a Sumatra expected to be low "can receive equally high preference scores although their intensity rankings will be quite different."
• Acidity has character. Coffee contains many organic acids, including citric, malic and acetic acid, along with chlorogenic acids, and roasting changes their levels (Yeager et al., 2023). Tasters describe the character with words like citrus-like, malic or apple-like, winey, or sharp.

Acidity in tasting describes a taste. It says nothing about whether coffee will upset your stomach.

SCA 102 defines sweetness as "the perception of gustatory or retronasal sweetness provoked by the brew." The older SCAA protocol adds that it is "a pleasing fullness of flavor as well as any obvious sweetness," and that its opposite is sour, astringent or "green" flavors.

Note the word "retronasal" in that definition: aromas such as caramel, honey, brown sugar or ripe fruit can read as "sweet" even though you are smelling them. Descriptors help here, so say what kind of sweet.

Body is touch, not taste. SCA 102 defines mouthfeel as "the tactile perception of the brew while it is in the mouth," covering "the brew's weight and viscosity, its texture, and other tactile properties such as astringency (mouth-drying property)."

Describe body on a scale from light (tea-like, watery) to heavy (syrupy, coating), then describe the texture: silky, creamy, juicy, round, rough or drying. Like acidity, light body is not a fault. The SCAA protocol notes that a Sumatra expected to be heavy and a Mexican coffee expected to be light can both score well.

Balance is how flavor, aftertaste, acidity and body "work together and complement or contrast to each other" (SCAA protocol). A coffee is unbalanced when one attribute overpowers the rest, or when something is missing. In the 2024 Coffee Value Assessment, balance is no longer scored separately; it is folded into the overall impression.

These two judge consistency and faults rather than flavor.

• Clean cup means "a lack of interfering negative impressions from first ingestion to final aftertaste, a 'transparency' of cup" (SCAA protocol). A cup with any non-coffee taste or aroma fails.
• Uniformity means the cups of the same sample taste alike. This is why cupping uses several cups of each coffee: one defective bean can spoil one cup and not the others.

The 2024 SCA form replaces both scores with counts of non-uniform cups and defective cups. See the cupping score explainer.

Overall is your holistic impression of the coffee: the place where personal appraisal is expected. Defects are off-flavors. The classic protocol separates a taint (noticeable but not overwhelming, usually in the aroma) from a fault (overwhelming, or makes the sample unpalatable, usually in the taste), and asks the cupper to name it, for example "sour", "rubbery", "ferment" or "phenolic".

Your tongue detects sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami. In coffee, sourness is usually discussed as acidity, and bitterness is always present to some degree. The SCA's descriptive form asks the taster to tick up to two main tastes that stand out in a coffee, noting that "though all coffees have bitterness," it should be ticked only "if bitterness stands out."

• Taste side by side. Differences are much easier to name in comparison, which is why cupping puts several coffees on one table.
• Go from general to specific. "Fruity", then "citrus", then "clementine". Stop at the level you are sure of.
• Smell real references. Keep fruit, nuts, spices, tea and chocolate around and smell them next to the coffee. The WCR lexicon is built on references like these.
• Use the same words every time. A shared vocabulary is what lets two tasters compare notes.

The Coffee Tasting app is built around this: each field is a pick from a list, and you can drill down from Fruit to Citrus to Clementine or stop wherever you are confident.