Acidity

Taste those high, thin notes, the dryness the coffee leaves at the back of your palate and under the edges of your tongue? This pleasant tartness, snap, or twist, combined with an underlying sweetness, is what coffee people call acidity. It should be distinguished from sour or astringent, which in coffee terminology means an unpleasant sharpness. The acidy notes should be very clear, powerful and transparent in the Costa Rica, rich and wine- or berry-toned in the Kenya, and deeper-toned and muted in the Sumatra. They should be drier in the Costa Rica and perhaps a bit sweeter in the Kenya. Robustas and some lower-grown arabica coffees may display virtually no acidity whatsoever and consequently taste flat.

You may not run into the terms acidity or acidy in your local coffee seller's signs and brochures. Many retailers avoid describing a coffee as acidy for fear consumers will confuse a positive acidy brightness with an unpleasant sourness. Instead you will find a variety of creative euphemisms: bright, dry, sharp, brisk, vibrant, etc.

An acidy coffee is somewhat analogous to a dry wine. In some coffees the acidy taste actually becomes distinctly winy; the winy taste should be relatively clear in the Kenya. In promotional tags you may find the tones that I call winy described with other terms: fruity, dry fruit, and various specific fruit names, particularly berry and black current. The main challenge is to recognize the fundamental complex of fruit and wine-like sensations; once you do that, you can call them anything you like.

Body

Body or mouth-feel is the sense of heaviness, tactile richness, or thickness when you swish the coffee around your mouth. It also describes texture: oily, buttery, thin, etc. To cite a wine analogy again, cabernets and certain other red wines are heavier in body than most white wines. In this case wine and coffee tasters use the same term for a similar phenomenon. All of the sample coffees I recommend should have relatively substantial body -- either the Costa Rica or the Sumatra will be the heaviest and the Kenya -- usually a medium-bodied coffee -- the lightest. In terms of texture or mouth-feel the Sumatra may display the most interest -- perhaps an oily or gritty sensation. But avoid inventing something you fail to taste. None of these coffees will be thin-bodied or anemic.

Aroma

Strictly speaking, aroma cannot be separated from acidity and flavour. Acidy coffees smell acidy, and richly flavoured coffees smell richly flavoured. Nevertheless, certain high, fleeting notes are reflected most clearly before the coffee is actually tasted. There is frequently a subtle floral note to some coffee that is experienced most clearly in the aroma, particularly at the moment the crust is broken in the traditional tasting ritual. Of the three coffees I recommend for your tasting, you are most likely to detect these fresh floral notes in the Kenya, but depending on the roast and freshness of the coffee you could experience it in any of the three samples. Latin-American coffees brought to a medium roast, like the Costa Rica, may display a sweet vanilla-nut complex in aroma. The Sumatra also may exhibit smoky, pungent, earthlike, or spicy notes. Finally, if your Costa Rica is a La Minita, the aroma should have a sort of echoing, resonant depth to it. The same should be true of the Kenya, whereas you may find that the aromatic sensations of the Sumatra are rather immediate and limited, without a sense of dimension opening behind and around them.

Finish

If aroma is the overture of the coffee, then finish is the resonant silence at the end of the piece. Finish is a term relatively recently brought over into coffee tasting from wine connoisseurship. It describes the immediate sensation after the coffee is spit out or swallowed. Some coffees develop in the finish -- they change in pleasurable ways. All three of the sample coffees I recommend should develop in the finish. I would predict that the pungent tones of the Sumatra may soften toward cocoa or chocolate in the finish, and the dry wine or berry tones of the Kenya turn sweeter and fruitier.

Flavour

Flavour is a catch-all term for everything we do not experience in terms of the categories of acidity, aroma and body. In another sense, it is a synthesis of them all. Some coffees simply display a fuller, richer flavour than others, are more complex, or more balanced, whereas other coffees have an acidy tang, for instance, that tends to dominate everything else. Some are flat, some are lifeless, some are strong but mono-toned. We also can speak of a distinctively flavoured coffee, a coffee whose flavour characteristics clearly distinguish it from others.

The following are some terms and categories often used to describe and evaluate flavour. Some are obvious, many overlap, but all are useful.

• Richness

  Richness partly refers to body, partly to flavour; at times even to acidity. The term describes an interesting, satisfying fullness.

• Range

  This is one of my favorite tasting concepts. Imagine that the sensations evoked by a mouthful of coffee are a musical chord. Then take note of where the main interest and complexity of sensation is concentrated. The Kenya will have great complexity throughout, but particularly in the higher ranges, the equivalent of treble notes. The Sumatra, if it is a good one, will be very complex in the lower ranges, the equivalent of base notes. The Costa Rica will be more integrated and total, perhaps with sensation more concentrated in the middle range.

• Complexity

  I take complexity to describe flavour that shifts among pleasurable possibilities, tantalizes, and does not completely reveal itself at any one moment; a harmonious multiplicity of sensation. The Kenya is probably most complex; if the Sumatra is a good one it may also be complex, though perhaps less balanced. If the Sumatra is not a particularly good one it may feel hard and mono-toned on the palate. The Costa Rica is probably more like a singular bellclap -- perfect, resonant, contained and complete.

• Balance

  This is a difficult term. When tasting coffees for defects, professional tasters use the term to describe a coffee that does not localize at any one point on the palate; in other words, it is not imbalanced in the direction of some one (often undesirable) taste characteristic. As a term of general evaluation, balance appears to mean that no one quality overwhelms all others, but there is enough complexity in the coffee to arouse interest. It is a term that on occasion damns with faint praise. The Costa Rica sample should be most balanced, although it probably has fewer idiosyncrasies to balance than the other two coffees. The Kenya should be both complex and balanced; the Sumatra may be imbalanced by overbearing pungent tones and may be a bit rough.

Espresso Terms

The following terms often come up informally in discussions of espresso coffees, though more as terms of connoisseurship than of trade. They relate as much to the effects of brewing and roasting as to the qualities of the original green bean and are less clearly defined than the technical tasting terms defined earlier.

• Sweetness

  The sensation this term describes is not the brassy monotone of refined white sugar, but rather a vibrant natural sweetness shimmering inside and around other positive sensations. Sweetness in an espresso is owing to inherently sweet beans that have been produced only from ripe fruit, to a tactful roast style that carmelizes the sugars in the bean rather than burning them, and to proper brewing technique.

• Bitterness

  The bitter bite of some espresso coffees should be distinguished from the acidy tones of a medium-roast coffee, since the bitterness described here is a taste characteristic encouraged by dark-roasting. It is not an unpleasant characteristic. Most West-Coast American and many Latin-American blends are bitter by design. Espresso drinkers in these regions find the lighter-roasted, sweeter espresso blends preferred by northern Italians bland by comparison. If the distinction between bitter and acidy seems abstract, an analogy might help. Acidity is like the dry sensation in most wines, a mild astringency balanced by sweetness. The bitter sensation that arises from dark-roasting is more analogous to the bitterness of certain aperitifs like Campari, for example; it is a more dominating sensation, and less localized on the palate.

• Pungency

  A word to describe the pleasant, fresh-sweat, sweet-yet-twisty tones of a good West-Coast-style American espresso blend. If there is a Peet's coffee store near you, go in and sniff the coffee bins for a suggestion of the sensation I am describing. This aroma complex is seldom encountered in Italian espressos, but is a common characteristic of North- and Latin-American blends. It is apparently created by a dark roast achieved slowly. Bittersweetness might be another word for it.

• Smooth

  Smooth is an epithet describing an espresso coffee that can be taken comfortably without milk and with very little sugar, a coffee in which a heavy body and the sweet sensation described above predominate over bitter and acidy tones.