Your Palate Is Built From Everything You Have Already Tasted

Nutty and chocolatey. That is what this Brazilian is to me, sitting here this morning. Dark chocolate specifically, because dark chocolate is the chocolate I know best. I would say that out loud without thinking twice. The part I have gotten more careful about is the next sentence. What is it to you, and why is it different?

We audit the person, not the cup

Somebody describes a coffee in a way that is slightly off from what we expected, and our attention goes straight to the person. We start quietly checking their experience, their history, how many times they have had this bean, whether they know what they are talking about. It comes out as a kind of offence. How dare you taste something different than what we taste. I do it too.

I have been going back and forth with a couple of people lately, mostly because I wanted to see where their palates actually were, and how their lives had shaped the way they taste. Some of what they said wove into what I thought and some of it stayed stubbornly apart, and both of those were useful.

My own taste has a history, and so does yours

I have a preference for medium to dark roast. I think that range expresses the coffees I drink in the way I most want them expressed. That was not always true. I spent a long stretch on light roast, and I still do not fully know whether I liked it on my own or because I was around people who liked it. I think some of it was genuine. Then I developed a real distaste for a lot of it, or at least for how long I had to wait to find sweetness in it, and eventually I admitted it was not going to be my thing.

Which has not stopped me roasting lightly roasted coffees, regularly. I want to know what is in them, on my equipment, in my morning.

All of that, in whatever order it happened, is my history with coffee. It is my struggles with it, and a few triumphs, and it is sitting in my mouth every time I taste something new.

The mornings the coffee wins

I have a strange relationship with a cup. When I drink coffee I often feel like it is me against the coffee. I am trying to understand it, trying to get it to give something up. I may not be able to name every element in it, but I know that if I move one lever, or change the water, I can pull something exciting out of it.

Then there are the mornings where I use everything in the toolbox and nothing works. Those cups stay with me. I will be sitting somewhere later that day, drinking water, watching television, playing with my kids, and I am still thinking about that coffee and how thoroughly it beat me. Undefeated.

What I eventually landed on is that the coffee was telling me who it was, and giving me the same answer whether I liked it or not. I keep coming back to that steadiness.

Where your words actually come from

Take two people, same coffee, same water, same recipe. Genuinely the same cup. One of them reaches for baker's chocolate. I reach for dark chocolate, because dark chocolate is what I have been eating for years and it is nearer to hand than baker's chocolate will ever be for me. Somebody says marshmallow, meaning that soft airy kind of sweetness, and the closest thing I have for it is white sugar.

Two people, two libraries, both of them describing the same thing.

Mine got built in ordinary places. My son loves apples, and we taste them together and talk about them. He tells me why he likes the ones he likes, I push him to explain further, and then I taste it and see what he means. One apple is sweet and then stops, with nothing arriving after the first bite. Another, a Gala or a Fuji, has sweetness and acidity arriving together and holding each other up, and it wakes your whole mouth. That is where my language for acidity comes from. When I call something a soft apple acidity, I am describing my kitchen table.

Calibration is real, and it is a different job

There is a genuine time and place to calibrate, to work out what a particular roaster or taster means by the words they are using, so you can see the coffee from where they are standing. That is a specific job with a specific purpose.

Deciding who is right is a different job. When somebody says something that makes you go whoa, the human move is to call it wrong. That is nonsense, this is what this coffee tastes like. No. That is what that coffee tastes like to that person, and their history is the reason.

The morning I stopped being sure

I made a Costa Rican honey processed coffee recently. Lightly roasted, a little sweetness, and extremely fruity to me. I sat with it a while and appreciated it. A few minutes later my wife came in with her own cup, which had creamer in it, and told me the coffee was extremely fruity.

I had assumed creamer put a cloud over everything. She read straight through the cloud and found the same thing I found. Neither of us gave the other any more detail than that one word, which is a shame, because which fruit is exactly where her library and mine would have separated. We got there by completely different routes and both of us were telling the truth.

So what is your coffee story? Where did you start, and where is it going? I want to know, and I am fairly sure it is going to be different from mine.