What We Mean When We Write Tasting Notes (the Honest Version of the Words on the Bag)

Every bag we ship has a few words on it. Sometimes it's three. Sometimes it's six. They're the flavor descriptors we wrote when we cupped the coffee. We try to make them accurate, useful, and not pretentious. This post is what those words actually mean, how we pick them, and what we deliberately don't put on the bag.

The structure of a tasting note

A complete coffee description has three parts:

The aroma descriptors. What you smell when you break the bag open and stick your nose in. These are usually a few "fruit" or "sweet" or "spice" words. They're the first impression and the most volatile — aroma compounds off-gas faster than flavor compounds dissolve into water.

The cup descriptors. What the cup tastes like after brewing. These usually cover acidity (what kind of acid, how bright), body (how heavy or light on the tongue), and the main flavor categories (chocolate, fruit, nuts, etc.).

The finish. What lingers after you swallow. Usually one or two descriptors — something that defines how the cup "ends."

Most of our tasting notes collapse this into one to two lines. "Black cherry, dark chocolate, almond finish" is a complete description in nine words.

How we pick the words

The picking process happens at the cupping table. The coffee is brewed at our standard cupping recipe (1:18 ratio, 93 °C, 4 minutes steep, then break the crust, wait 3 minutes, slurp). Three or four of us taste the cup blind — we don't know which coffee is which.

The first descriptor each person writes down is usually a real one. It's the thing that hit them in the first sip. Those get aggregated across the cuppers. Words that come up more than once stay. Words that only one person wrote tend to be calibrated against the room.

Then we run the cup again. The descriptors narrow. We agree on three to six words that we all agree describe the cup. Those go on the bag.

The descriptors we don't agree on (the ones one cupper wrote that the others didn't pick up on) are usually the ones that describe specific or unusual characteristics. We don't put those on the bag because we don't want a customer looking for them when they don't taste them. We do put them in our internal records, because they might be useful for product development later.

What "bright" actually means

If we describe a coffee as "bright," we mean: high acidity, often citric or malic, often with a clear perceptual lift on the front of the sip. Bright doesn't mean sour. Sour is the absence of sugar or the over-extraction of acids; bright is the presence of acid balanced by sugar and body.

A bright Kenyan AA is bright because of the phosphoric acid compounds in the bean. A bright washed Geisha is bright because of the combination of high altitude and the citric acid compounds.

If you've never had a coffee described this way, try one of our bright single origins and a "round" or "balanced" coffee side by side. You'll feel the difference on your tongue immediately, and the words will start making more sense.

What "clean" actually means

Clean is the absence of off-flavors rather than the presence of a specific flavor. A "clean" cup doesn't have bag flavor (from old beans or bad storage), doesn't have ferment notes (from over-fermented processing), doesn't have papery or cardboard notes (from over-aged beans).

Most of our coffee is clean because we cup the green sample and the post-roast sample before we list it. The cups that aren't clean don't make it to the catalog.

If a customer writes to us about a coffee that tasted "off," we ask for the batch code. If the bag also tasted off to us at the cupping table, we'd already have pulled it. If we're both noticing the same off-note, we know it's a real problem. If only the customer is noticing it, we ask if they're brewing at a different ratio, with different water, or with different equipment than we'd recommend. That often catches the issue.

What "chocolate" and "cocoa" mean

These are not interchangeable. "Chocolate" usually refers to milk chocolate or semi-sweet chocolate character — a sweet, soft, slightly creamy body. "Cocoa" is drier, more dark-chocolate, more bitter, more rounded on the finish.

We use "chocolate" for coffees that are sweeter, fruitier, or rounder — Brazilian coffees, some Indonesian coffees, most dark-roasted blends. We use "cocoa" for the same descriptors when the cup is more bitter and the finish is drier.

What "fruit" really means

"Fruit" without a specific fruit name is dishonest on a bag. We don't do that. If we're describing a coffee that has a fruit character, we say which fruit. "Black cherry," "red apple," "stone fruit," "citrus," "dried fig" — these are all specific.

If we don't know which fruit, we leave "fruit" off the bag entirely. This is one place where we don't trust the broad descriptor.

A few fruit notes that look like they mean the same thing but don't:

• "Black cherry" and "cherry" are different. Black cherry is darker, sweeter, more jammy. Cherry is sharper, brighter, more acidic.
• "Red apple" and "apple" — same logic. Red apple has the tart skin note, the sweet flesh note. Apple as a descriptor alone is too vague.
• "Stone fruit" includes peach, nectarine, plum, apricot. We use it when the coffee shows several of these. If it's specifically apricot, we say apricot.

What we leave off the bag

Some common coffee words we won't use, even when they're technically accurate.

"Floral" without a specific flower. Most people don't know what "floral" means as a coffee descriptor. If a coffee is jasmine-forward, we say jasmine. If it's rose-forward, we say rose. "Floral" alone is too vague.

"Complex." Every specialty coffee is complex by definition. The word on the bag doesn't tell the customer what's distinct about this coffee.

The empty tier words — the ones specialty coffee tends to use to imply quality without describing it. We don't use these on the bag, in the marketing, or in any other customer-facing material.

"Smooth." This is one that depends. "Smooth" in a coffee sense usually means "low acidity." The customer experience of "smooth" coffee can be muddy, can be flat, can be sweet, can be soft. We sometimes use "smooth" when a coffee genuinely has that character, but we don't use it as a default descriptor.

"Bold." Means "strong flavor." Means different things to different people. We don't use it on the bag.

Made-up tasting notes. We don't put flavor words that don't appear in the cup. There are a few bad actors in coffee marketing who describe their coffee with words like "blueberry muffin" or "strawberry lemonade" that aren't in the cup. We don't do that. If it's not in the cup at the cupping table, it's not on the bag.

What the descriptors aren't telling you

Even when the descriptor is accurate, it's missing context. A "blueberry" note doesn't tell you the cup is light-bodied or heavy-bodied, dry-processed or washed-processed, bright or rounded. The descriptor is one dimension of the cup.

This is why we recommend trying two or three descriptors from different coffees side by side. The descriptor words are not the whole cup. They're a starting point.

See our current single-origin coffees.

P.S. If you've ever tasted a coffee and noticed a flavor we didn't list on the bag, we'd love to hear about it. Sometimes we miss a descriptor because no one in the room picked it up. The customer's palate is a useful check on ours.

— Seraphina