Coffee Tasting Notes Explained: What the Words Mean
What coffee tasting notes such as blueberry or cocoa really mean, who writes them, a short glossary of acidity, body and finish, and a home exercise to learn them.
Tasting notes on a coffee bag are comparisons, not ingredients.
When a bag says blueberry, nothing fruity has been added: a roaster or taster found that the brewed coffee reminded them of that flavour. If you cannot find the notes yet, that is common, and practice and side-by-side tasting are the usual remedies.
This page explains where the words come from, defines the handful of terms that matter most, and gives you a small exercise for learning to recognise them.
Where the words come from
Roasters usually arrive at their notes by cupping, a standard tasting where ground coffee is steeped in the cup it will be tasted from and sampled by spoon. One retailer guide says tasters may also try other brewing methods before settling on the notes printed on the bag. The notes are one person's or one team's description, so two roasters can describe the same coffee differently.
To reduce that gap, the industry has a shared vocabulary. World Coffee Research's Sensory Lexicon was built at the Sensory Analysis Center at Kansas State University and names 110 flavour, aroma and texture attributes found in coffee, each with a reference for judging intensity. The Specialty Coffee Association (then SCAA) and World Coffee Research used it as the base for a redesigned Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel, launched in January 2016. It replaced the earlier wheel by Ted Lingle, which was about 21 years old, and its groupings came from a UC Davis study with sensory scientists and industry professionals. The wheel is a vocabulary tool. It is not a quality score.
The lexicon is free to download and print for personal use, so you can read the reference list yourself.
A short glossary
| Term | What it means in a cup | How to check it |
|---|---|---|
| Acidity | How sharp or bright a coffee tastes. Prized when well judged, a flaw when out of balance. | Notice the brightness, and taste again once the coffee has cooled, when it is easiest to notice |
| Body | Weight or thickness in the mouth, also called mouthfeel. One guide compares whole and skimmed milk | Compare two coffees one after the other: which feels heavier? |
| Sweetness | The counterweight to acidity. Without it, acidity tastes merely sour | Does the coffee taste rounded or sharp? |
| Finish | The aftertaste. One guide suggests swallowing and judging what lingers over about 10 to 20 seconds | Is the flavour clean and pleasant, or does it turn bitter or sour? |
| Balance | Acidity and sweetness in proportion; one guide says that mix often separates good coffee from excellent | Does one attribute dominate, or do they sit together? |
These definitions come from roaster and retailer guides, not a regulator, so expect small differences between sources. Bitterness and acidity are different things: bitterness shows up as a harsh aftertaste, while acidity is a brightness. See our coffee extraction guide for how brewing changes sourness and bitterness.
Why you may not taste the notes
Flavour is not the same as taste. Taste cells detect five basic tastes (sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami), and the NIDCD explains that these combine with aroma, temperature and texture to produce flavour. Aromas reach the nose from the back of the mouth as you drink, through a channel connecting the throat to the nose. When that channel is blocked, as in a cold, food tastes bland. That is why blueberry or jasmine is mostly a smell experience, and, as an editorial tip, exhaling through the nose after a sip is worth trying.
Three other things get in the way.
- Practice. One retailer guide says experienced tasters notice finer differences, and the usual advice is to taste regularly and to compare coffees side by side.
- Expectation. In a 2026 study, 180 specialty coffee consumers tasted the same coffee under three labels. The one labelled "fermentation" was expected to be the most acidic and the least liked, and tasting confirmed that. The label shaped the experience. That study tested processing labels, not tasting notes, so it only suggests that reading the note on the bag first may steer what you notice.
- Disagreement among experts. A 2025 study asked 49 professional graders from Brazil and Switzerland to describe 67 Coffea canephora (robusta) samples. The authors discuss differences between exporting and importing graders in the terms they used and the scores they gave. If trained tasters differ, your first attempts will too.
A small tasting exercise
You do not need a full cupping set. A scaled-down version of the SCA method works at home.
- Choose two contrasting coffees, for example a light, fruity roast and a dark, chocolatey roast.
- Weigh the dose. The SCA protocol uses 8.25 g of coffee per 150 mL of water, about 1:18. For 100 mL of water that is 5.5 g (arithmetic from the same ratio).
- Grind just before pouring. The SCA grind spec is 70 to 75% of the particles passing through a US standard 20 mesh sieve.
- Pour water at about 93°C (199°F). The protocol allows roughly 92 to 94°C.
- Smell the dry grounds, then wait 4 minutes and break the crust with a spoon, smelling as you break it. Skim the surface.
- Slurp from a spoon. The slurp aerates the coffee and spreads it over the tongue; one source puts a spoonful at about 4 to 5 mL. Wait until it has cooled to about 77°C (170°F), then taste again as it cools, because flavours change.
- Write one word per category: sweet, fruity, nutty, cocoa, floral, roasted. Do not try to name the exact fruit until you can tell categories apart.
On the SCA 100-point scale used in formal cupping, 80 and above is specialty and 70 to 79.9 is commercial. You do not need to score anything at home.
What to do, and what to skip
If you are new, begin with the glossary words above and two coffees side by side, rather than the full wheel. Skip the exact-fruit game: the exercise above is good enough to tell you which coffees you like. If you want to explore further, the coffee flavour wheel guide goes deeper on the wheel.
Questions
What are coffee cupping notes?
They are the descriptors a taster records at a cupping. According to Seattle Coffee Gear, the notes printed on a bag come out of that process.
Where can I get a tasting notes chart or card?
World Coffee Research makes its Sensory Lexicon free to download and print for personal use, and it is the basis of the SCA wheel.
Do tasting notes follow the country of origin?
Only partly. Plant variety, soil, altitude, climate, processing and roasting all shape the flavour, so country is one clue among several. See our coffee terroir guide.
Related
- Coffee flavour wheel guide
- Coffee extraction
- Coffee roast levels
- Coffee terroir
- Coffee defects and taints
Sources
- World Coffee Research, Sensory Lexicon.
- Daily Coffee News, SCAA unveils a whole new Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel, 19 January 2016.
- NIDCD, Taste disorders (how taste, smell and flavour combine).
- Seattle Coffee Gear, A note on tasting notes (roaster-facing retailer guide).
- Clumsy Goat, Guide to basic coffee terms.
- Royal Coffee, How to set up and run a coffee cupping and its Cupping Protocols and Procedures (restating the SCA protocol).
- Wikipedia, Coffee cupping (slurp and spoon volume).
- Carvalho FM, de Sousa MMM, Nadaleti DHS. Label information about fermentation processing affects consumers' sensory and hedonic judgements of specialty coffee. Foods (2026). DOI 10.3390/foods15081287.
- Carvalho FM, Alves EA, Artêncio MM, Cassago ALL, Pereira LL. Development of a flavour wheel for Coffea canephora using rate-all-that-apply. Scientific Reports (2025). DOI 10.1038/s41598-025-99921-w.