Coffee, Five Senses

Did you see this by Giorgio Milos?

Have I mentioned Intelligentsia lately? OK, coffee buffs, what’s the best coffee you’ve tasted?

My Top Five: Intelligentsia, Chestnut Hill, DoubleShot, Five Senses [Perth area], Stumptown.

Coffee is extremely complex chemically and physically, each green bean containing around 500 aromatic and flavor components. And that’s just for starters. Roasting increases that count three-fold, the heat creating entirely new components while also intensifying the elements present prior to roasting. Length and temperature of the roast ultimately determine how fully the raw bean is transformed. Wine, considered among the most complex and nuanced beverages, has but 300-400 components. In tech terms, coffee is data rich, bursting with sensory information that taste alone can’t process.

Preparation method wields considerable influence over how our senses experience coffee. Espresso sits at one end of the spectrum, its mix of water temperature, pressure, and time producing a highly concentrated, viscous liquid awash in complexity. At the other end of the range are methods like French press and brewed, which don’t extract coffee as fully as espresso, and as a result don’t carry as much sensory data. In sonic terms, these methods produce more mid-range, less treble and bass.

Experiencing all that coffee has to offer is a two-way street, involving roasting and preparation dynamics on one side, and on the other how attuned our senses are to the data that coffee transmits. If you’ve done a formal wine tasting, you’re probably familiar with this idea. Tasting as applied here is a misnomer, by the way, because it suggests that only one sense is involved.

Here are basics on how our senses work, and the role each plays in processing coffee’s rich data. We’ll go in order of processing speed, fastest to slowest.