Tasting Made Simple, Part One: Slow Down and Enjoy Your Coffee

You can drink excellent coffee every morning and still miss much of what makes it excellent. You've chosen good beans, taken care with the brewing, and poured yourself a cup. Then the day gets moving, and somehow the coffee is gone before you've really noticed it.

I think that's a missed opportunity. If you're buying great coffee, you might as well get as much enjoyment from it as you can. The place to start is simple: slow down.

There's a useful distinction between drinking and tasting. Drinking is the familiar business of taking liquid into your mouth and swallowing it. We do it with water, coffee, beer, and plenty of other things, often without giving the process much thought. Tasting asks us to pay attention to what happens along the way.

That might sound obvious, but it changes the experience. When coffee moves straight from the cup to your stomach, there's very little opportunity to consider it. Let it linger for a moment, and you give yourself a chance to notice what's actually there.

You don't need a special vocabulary to do this. You don't need to identify an obscure fruit or produce an impressive description. Those things can come later if they interest you. The first step is simply allowing yourself to experience the coffee more fully.

Take a small sip. Let it sit in your mouth briefly, and move it around a little before swallowing. Give yourself a moment to register the flavour, the aroma, and the way the coffee feels. Then take another sip and see what you notice.

Perhaps it feels softer than you expected. Perhaps there's some sweetness, or a liveliness you hadn't paid attention to before. You might simply find yourself thinking, "That's really good." That's a perfectly useful place to begin. The exercise is about increasing your enjoyment, and ordinary words are enough.

In the video, I'm drinking Sumava Black Cherry from Costa Rica, produced by our friend Francisco Mena. I use it to demonstrate this small change in approach: take a little coffee, let it linger, move it around, and give your brain time to register the experience. The same starting point applies to whatever coffee is in your cup.

Temperature deserves some attention, too. We brew coffee with hot water, but brewing temperature and comfortable drinking temperature are two different things. In the video, I mention brewing around 92°C, with some room to adjust according to your preference. That certainly doesn't mean you should try to drink coffee at that temperature.

Give your cup time to cool enough that you can comfortably hold a small sip in your mouth. If you're immediately swallowing because the coffee is painfully hot, it's going to be difficult to practise tasting. A little patience makes the whole exercise more pleasant.

Try this with a few sips of your next cup. You don't have to turn your entire morning into a formal tasting session. Just pause long enough to notice the thing you chose, brewed, and paid for.

For me, that's the point of learning to taste. Coffee is already part of our daily routine. Paying a little more attention gives us the chance to enjoy that familiar moment more fully.

In part two, we'll look at how our tongue and sense of smell work together to make that possible.