How to Taste Coffee: Develop Your Sensory Skills and Get the Most Out of Every Cup

by Jessica Easto

Home coffee-making authority and author of Craft A Manual introduces you to the wide world of coffee flavor.

Have you ever purchased coffee based on delectable flavor notes—strawberry jam, milk chocolate, hazelnut—only to find none of it in your cup? It’s a common experience among coffee lovers. These days, high-quality coffee can taste all kinds of ways, thanks to roasting techniques that help draw out the qualities of the bean. In addition to that characteristic coffee taste, you really can find hints of fruit, chocolate, and nuts in your cup—all it takes is a little knowledge, a little practice, and the ability to slow down and savor.

That’s where How to Taste Coffee comes in. With the same accessible, no-shame approach she took in Craft Coffee, bestselling author Jessica Easto explains why flavor notes are not always as straightforward with coffee as they are with other beverages, such as wine, beer, and spirits. You’ll learn how our senses perceive coffee, what creates and affects coffee flavor, and how to practice your sensory skills, using the same tools and resources as coffee professionals. With nineteen exercises designed to help you identify and talk about what you’re tasting, you’ll come away with a more developed palate, an improved ability to choose coffee you’re going to love, and a better understanding of the astounding complexity contained within these tiny beans. A must-read for any lover of coffee, How to Taste Coffee inspires readers to taste widely and sip consciously, with more appreciation, more discernment, and a greater sense of wonder.

Genres: Nonfiction, Food, Reference, Cooking, Foodie, Cookbooks

200 pages, Hardcover

First published October 31, 2023

Reviews

[Anne (In Search of Wonder) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book delved a lot deeper into the science of taste than I was expecting, and your girl is NOT into science. Especially chemistry. Biology, OK, but when we start getting to the cellular level, I'm out.

HOWEVER. I understood enough of the science talk from the first half of the book that it provided the necessary framework for comprehending the more practical aspects of the second book, where the author actually begins to discuss the process of tasting coffee.

More than merely TASTING coffee, this book teaches you how to CATEGORIZE and VERBALIZE what you are tasting, which can be a very tricky thing. I would like to read more books about different types of beans and the process of roasting (not to mention the process of coffee preparation), all of them in terms of taste. But this is a good overview on tasting coffee in general and I benefited from this read.

[Tuscany Bernier · Rating 4 out of 5]

It wasn't too bad honestly.

[Deryk Rumbold · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love how romantic the tone is about such a niche topic. So much care and passion for appreciating coffee tasting that it is infectious and draws you in. I wanted to just try a cup with every single word like it was a pitch for coffee tasting. A beautiful collision of science and appreciation.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

I stumbled upon this book at the library. Wasn’t searching for it at all, but picked it up and found it rather fascinating.

Much of the book is written from a technical perspective, using a lot of scientific terms related to our senses and the intricacies of coffee itself. However, what I found fascinating was… first of all, how the senses work together as we experience coffee, and secondly, how the language we generally use around experiencing food or drink is limited based on the fact that we’re not experts in scientifically understanding how our senses work together when we experience smells and tastes in the first place.

Having known for sometime that, as a coffee drinker, I am not experiencing all that coffee has to offer, this book kind of got me amped to maybe, someday open the door to those possibilities. Essentially, if we all followed the advice of this book we would all become coffee “snobs.”

The other interesting thing was learning that our likes and dislikes when it comes to taste, are partly inherited, and then partly adaptable based on the effort we put it to experiment and experience new things.

[Štěpán Vácha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked it and learned something new. I appreciate how scientific it was, and how deep it sometimes went.
I read the Czech translation though and it wasn’t perfect - lots of niche errors, missing °F-°C conversions, messed up references…

[Mindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great resource on how to train your palate to taste coffee, describe flavor notes, discern various acids and other aspects of coffee. Includes information on how to use the SCA flavor wheel.

[Timothy Grubbs · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was literally in the title…

How to Taste Coffee: Develop Your Sensory Skills and Get the Most Out of Every Cup by Jessica Easto is a guide to drinking coffee and appreciating…if you are into it that much.

A few things to cover…the book does not cover the history and different regional varieties of coffee from around the world. They also don’t include cold brew…one of my favorite styles. They also avoid any discussion of sugar and cream.

So if you like different styles of just straight coffee (which I can’t complain about that as most of the coffee I drink is black), then this is helpful.

Basically it covers different “tastes” that coffee can have, though it refrains from indicating any particular brands or styles that match the “taste”. At most, they cover non-coffee items with comparable tastes.

They also have some “palate exercises” and discussion of sieprtasters if you wish to develop your coffee appreciation abilities.

[Kaitlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating little book about developing our sense of taste. The science of taste was interesting without being too textbook like. There are lots of palate exercises, but I haven't done them because I didn't want to buy all the ingredients to only use a tiny portion. I don't even drink much coffee, but think a lot of this book applies to picking up flavor profiles in other foods as well.

I received this free copy through a Goodreads giveaway.

[NoRa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good introductory to the subject. This year has been the most that I've drank coffee. Previously I was solely a tea drinker. Picked this book up just to be more knowledgeable on coffee.

[CybercrrEDU]

Something tells me that this book would be fantastic healing for an ex-mormon cult member... That being said I'm hoping to get a copy.

[Cathy · Rating 1 out of 5]

2 star content - Maybe the author is trying to cram more words needed to explain anything, because there really isn't much content delivered. There is some *useful* information, but you'll need to try very hard. It could be summarized in 50 pages, max. Or perhaps reading this is the non-science person-explaining-science-to-a-scientist type of situation.

Why does the experiments include "tasting sugar water/epsom salt - what does it reminds you of?" and also "tasting water with citric acid" or malic acid as if all of a sudden the reader's kitchen is a food-chem lab, while previously s/he couldn't even tell the difference between sweet and bitter, or the scent of flowers and that of fruit? Yes, guess what, sometimes I eat cakes and shampoo gets into my mouth while I shower. I don't need to set up an experiments to know these flavors. The book vacillates between very basic and not so well-explained technical facts.

0 star reading - Carolyn Jania is the worst book reader I've encountered. She sounds like snake-oil saleswoman and her tone can only be described as tacky and puke-inducing. Thankfully I could resist my gastro-reflux while playing her annoying voice at 2x speed. It makes the book even more painful.

[kerrigan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I enjoy Jessica Easto’s passion about coffee, especially coming from her first book (Craft Coffee, a manual), this book was lost on me.

The first half is too much about the senses, and not enough about coffee, accompanied by little science experiments (palate exercises), which was quite boring and contained too many words in general if you have any experience tasting, well, anything.

However, the second half was exactly what I was expecting, addressing the typical flavor notes you see at your average coffee shop or grocery store (floral, citrus, cocao, etc.) and the processes a coffee bean goes through to lead to those flavors.

If you really want to get pretentious about it, this book is for you. But chances are that if you’re reading this book, you probably consume a lot of coffee and already know which flavors you prefer.

[Holly Dyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5//The parts that spoke to average coffee-drinkers were very enlightening in terms of understanding tasting notes, distinguishing washed vs. natural process in a way that was very clear, and some practical tips for tasting coffee in a way to get more out of the cup. Other areas of the book got very technical / scientific—like all of the palate exercises and even the physiology of our senses—that felt dry and less engaging. It also feels like the audience is for coffee professionals but you know that she’s intending it for people making coffee at home. As someone who loves coffee, I don’t feel like I was the intended audience for this book, but I definitely took away some things.

[Damien Kotch · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is fantastic!

I don’t even like coffee but am fascinated with our sense of taste and this delivers beautifully! I was expecting more about the processing and production of coffee but that takes up a very small portion of the book.

I was also very pleased to find so many find activities to advance your pallet! Very very nice!

[Kathy Li · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author done a great job, this book helps a lot to helping me understand my sensory and getting improved

[Rebecca]

Did not finish. I was hoping this would be a lighter read based on its length, but it's pretty science-y, which wasn't what I was looking for.

[Bethany Coad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Informative, if not a bit over scientific. Some of the exercises were a bit out of reach, but could see it being a resource in broadening your skill if you were so inclined.

[Monica Albright · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has all the details you could ever want and more. So many specific items are in this small book, and I found it a bit overwhelming.

[Maureen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but way more in depth than I need.

[Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very instructive, and something to come back to.

[Zelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Oana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Found out new things about coffee and people's perception of it, about the role of the 5 senses in enjoying it, etc. Some of the exercises were definitely not for me, I haven't reached that level of passionate yet.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very thorough and well-sourced and studied book (by the author of Craft Coffee: A Manual) on how we taste…and then how to get better at analytically tasting. By design (I think) it can be a bit recursive, and it it has a ton of palate-training exercises from super-easy to pull together, to you will need to go on a shopping trip. Solid book!