Education Time: Sensory Class

February 13, 2015

Over the last few week at Gregorys we've been prompted with the question: "What is flavor?" Hold on one sec while I grab my thesis (...) Okay, so it's a bit of a trick question: one simply put in order to confound with its overturing scope. Nevertheless, it's a question that allows us to doublethink - contrary to the Orwellian - and reevaluate something seemingly mastered once you got a grip of knife and fork. At the root of this question are two terms: gustation (taste) and olfaction (smell).

Gustation: if something does not become a liquid, we cannot taste it.

Odd to think, but it's only in liquids that sensory information is gathered by the taste buds, sent along cranial nerves, and processed in the cerebral cortex. As Bailey, Director of Education, astutely observed while lecturing, even solids like mugs have a taste, but only due to whatever unseen "water-soluble matter" clings to the surface. Slightly gross, so we'll not look back at such pragmatic fact--embrace the word and move on.

In rather logical fashion (logos, you tireless animal!) more taste buds = more information/more taste. Like those blessed to suffer by their own genius, some of us are born with - and maintain - a set of taste buds that only make the most suitable for pickiness sufficient: it's a crippling affair when no $1 slices do the trick due to detected sweetness from high fructose corn syrup in bomb-shelter-worthy canned tomato sauce. On the other hand, taste can be a lucrative and invigorating experience; Tetley just insured one of their tea taster's taste buds for $1.6 million.

Olfaction: if something does not become a gas, we cannot smell it.

Compounds that are volatile - that can go airborne - stimulate our olfactory receptors in a twofold manner: they are inhaled as gases by sniffing and exhaled as vapors by swallowing. This is the start of its path along the limbic system, a set of brain structures in which the emotional life of you or I is largely housed. With the limbic system involved, smell maintains strong links with emotion, motivation and memory--ever smelt dew-soaked leaves in fall and zoned back to the Hyde Park of Dear Old Blighty, ruminating over how far your little legs could carry you before your parents bore the compassion, desperately sought, to get themselves to the playground at your selfsame speed? Maybe it's just this as-yet uncreated keyboard...

Whatever the case may be, "sense memory" is essential here. A person's anatomy, physiology, and psychology come into play and allow aromatic experience to vary from person-to-person, or even time-to-time for the same person. Having trouble deciphering the flavor notes on your Chemex-brewed coffee of pure clarity? Solution: Eat more, think while you taste, and develop some serious sense memory.

Now, getting down to the act of coffee olfaction and how to define it in those trusty symbols of a foregone conclusion: words.

First, there lies a problem. When two or more olfactory stimuli (aromas) are present in coffee - which is always the case - there are a handful of possibilities that present a seemingly limitless quandary--so much so that some stratifying bullet-points are required to hem the flow of alternatives in danger of falling to mush in the mind's eye:

·         a single newodor, blending the characteristics of each, may be perceived.

·         dissimilar odors may be perceived, with one being dominant.

·         odors may be smelled alternately.

·         odors may be simultaneously experienced but separately.

·         one odor may mask another.

·         one odor may neutralize another.

Lucky for our devotion to the spoken word, these possibilities can be honed on a Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel.

Flavor Wheel

The Wheel

This wheel is designed to direct our senses so that we can categorize the tastes/smells coming our way. The Specialty Coffee Association of America  (SCAA) have put their name to this particular lexicon of delight, but that is in no way for the purpose of delimiting our imagination; Counter Culture Coffee have a flavor wheel of their own to benefit the interface between body and brain--with taste, all is up for grabs; it's a dialectic of discovery. In fact, if you're particularly interested in discovery, here's 'A Guide to the Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel'excerpted from Roast Magazine, exhibiting both the history of the wheel and its deductive capabilities for coffee cuppers seeking words for the tip of their tongue.

Our SCAA-approved flavor wheel shows two wheel-like figurations, but our focus resides with the right side of the right wheel; the left wheel deals with the effects of coffee faults and taints--the negative nancy side of things detailed in the above guide--while the left side of the right wheel is all about taste. Since this post is somewhat partial to space and an emphasis on olfaction, we'll proceed with aroma.

The aromatic side of the wheel is segmented into three sources, each outlining where the smell we inhale/exhale comes from.

The first of these categories is enzymatic: aromatic compounds that are the result of enzyme reactions occurring in the coffee bean while it is a living organism. It is the most volatile set, and is most often discerned in the dry aroma of freshly ground coffee.

Second up is sugar browning: aromatic compounds that are the result of the caramelization that occurs during the roasting process. It is moderately volatile, found in the cup aroma of freshly brewed coffee, as well as the vapors as the coffee is swallowed i.e. the aftertaste.

Thirdly, dry distillation: aromatic compounds that result from the burning reaction of bean fiber during roasting. This is the least volatile and is most often found in the vapors (aftertaste) of freshly brewed coffee.

With these three sources in tow, we proceed further outfield in our aromatic half-hexagon: we find all the honey-like, camphoric, basmati rice flavors we ever assumed impossible in our morning cup and find that we actually like it - love it - and couldn't be without all these possibilities i.e. variety is the spice of life.

Here's a lovely fact to reward you for your time and interest in this keyboard's findings: the total aromatic profile of coffee is known as a bouquet. Coffee, like wine and liqueurs, adheres to this expression derived from a fold of flowers. By sound it could settle Woolf's flighty London or Wilde's aphoristic ego - a bouquet to correct the imbalance of humankind and nature; the dictum - mistakenly attributed to Goethe by Yeats - that 'art is art because it is not nature'. Coffee says nay.


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