Are you stuck in a coffee rut?
Ironic, right? Coffee culture is peaking. Never before has there been a greater diversity of beans or roasts available to the average coffee drinker. And yet, here you are drinking your tried-and-true French roast every morning.
Call it analysis paralysis, or whatever you want. We’re going to get you back into the game, starting now.
On a recent episode of The Wirecutter Show, a New York Times podcast, Chi Sum Ngai laid the groundwork for starting—or, restarting—a well-informed coffee-drinking routine. Ngai is the co-founder of Coffee Project New York, which, in addition to roasting and selling coffee, offers a range of classes for the coffee-curious.
If you’re looking for a little inspiration, start with the bag, or the product description on a website, and direct your eyes to the flavor profile. You’ll likely find words like milk chocolate, brown sugar, dark cherry, and hazelnut. While it might seem like marketing lingo, Ngai says it’s not baseless.
“Coffee itself is a fruit, so the innate flavor that you get from it, it’s going to be either fruity or something herbaceous or floral or a combination of both,” she says. “But when you see a bag of coffee that has notes like chocolate, hazelnut, brown sugar, these are all [the result of] the chemical reaction that’s happening when we put the bean into a roaster and start roasting them.”
More specifically, the roasting process alters the bean itself. So, when you see something like “milk chocolate” in the flavor profile, and the coffee is from a roaster of some repute, it’s because trained professionals like Ngai tasted milk chocolate in the coffee.
And that’s not just them willing the coffee to be something it probably isn’t. During the roasting process, Ngai says a compound in the coffee beans transformed into one that can also be found in … yep, milk chocolate. The same can also be said of the other flavors in the profile.
Calibrating these flavor profiles is a very intentional process that Ngai dives into in the podcast.
“Once in a while, we gather some of our team members and buy a bunch of spices, fruits, and we eat it together and try to pinpoint the product that we’re eating from the ground level,” she says.
“I’ll take a lime as an example,” Ngai continues. “When I have a lime, I cut it open and I start eating it. Instead of just saying sour, we’re diving into the five basic tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, umami, and salty. When we do an exercise like that together, we write down aroma, fragrance—we start from smelling them. And I remember doing this exercise and realizing for the first time, lime on its own is not just sharp, bright, and acidic; it’s actually salty.
“And then we would tone down our levels to match each other,” she says. “And at the same time, we would explain why we would taste this this way. This is how we stay calibrated in the professional setting.”
Keenly aware of all that goes into developing a flavor profile, Ngai admits it’s where she usually begins when seeking out a new coffee. After all, she says, it’s meant to make an impression, so find one that makes a positive impression on you.
In our next post, we’ll demystify a few more things that could have an outsize impact on your coffee-drinking experience.