Brew & Craft

Our senses create depth and richness in our lives. We cannot turn them on and off, but we are not always consciously aware of them. When you develop sensory skills, you tell your brain that flavors, aromas, and textures matter.

Likes and dislikes are a valuable starting point, but once you expand your sensory vocabulary, you open yourself to a much richer experience. Anyone can become a coffee grader or sensory professional — the difference between your skills today and those of a professional taster is simply experience.

As you continue to taste coffee, you begin to draw parallels between what you're tasting now and coffees you've tasted before. You may be reminded of a fruit you once ate or an aroma you once smelled. Two coffees may both be chocolaty, but one might have a more intense milk chocolate quality while the other is more like a cocoa nib.

As you grow as a taster, you will find deeper nuances of flavor. Your ability to match customers with their own ideal coffees will grow. Training your sensory skills leads to an enhanced level of understanding, respect, and appreciation for the world of coffee.

Although the words flavor and taste are used interchangeably in conversation, they are two different concepts. Taste is the sensation that happens in your mouth — primarily on your tongue. Flavor is how your brain synthesizes taste data with aroma data to form a complete experience.

You can test this yourself: pinch your nose and take a slurp of Pike Place® Roast. You'll detect sensations on your tongue, but the chocolaty and nutty flavors will be nowhere to be found. Release your nose — and suddenly the full flavor of cocoa and toasted nuts returns.

Inside every nose are approximately six million olfactory receptors (a dog has 300 million, but has a harder time holding a cupping spoon). Through the instantaneous mapping of aromatic molecules to the olfactory bulb, humans can differentiate about a trillion different scents.

The aroma of coffee is made up of many different singular aromas. A Kenyan coffee might have a bouquet of grapefruit, raspberry, and lemon zest. A wet-hulled Indonesian coffee may feature aromatic notes of green herbs and molasses. One of the challenges of developing sensory skills is breaking down a complex bouquet into its singular scents.

The olfactory bulb is located close to the regions of the brain that process memory and emotions. This is why smell, more than any other sense, triggers powerful memories. The next time you taste a coffee and are reminded of Sunday mornings with your grandmother, congratulate your olfactory perceptions on their "scent-memory" capabilities.

Created by the Specialty Coffee Association and World Coffee Research, and most recently updated in 2016, the Flavor Wheel is one of the most iconic resources in the coffee industry. Start at the innermost ring and work outward. Tap a category to explore it.

Food pairings can transform the experience of a coffee, completing it or even making it greater than the sum of its parts. Coffee flavors can be drawn out or enhanced when paired with certain foods.

Espresso is a small cup of concentrated, aromatic, and intense coffee. As it brews, the machine's pressure forces very hot water to pass quickly through finely ground coffee. An extraordinarily unique brew, high-quality espresso is at the heart of many of our favorite handcrafted beverages.

Starbucks did not introduce espresso beverages until opening its sixth store in 1984. Although today espresso machines can be found most everywhere — in restaurants, cafés, even car dealerships — they are relative newcomers. The legendary history of coffee itself goes all the way back to the 9th century, but espresso is a modern innovation.

The first steam espresso machine received a patent in Turin, Italy, in 1884 as "new steam machinery for the economic and instantaneous confection of coffee beverages." These early machines used a large steam boiler to force hot water through "pucks" of coffee — fast and prolific, but less elegant than today's espresso, often over-extracted and quite bitter, with fewer than two bars of pressure (modern machines use around five times as much).

Over the next century, espresso machine innovation created boilers that could generate the pressure needed for the beverage we now know. The innovation is ongoing — today espresso is made on many different machines, in different styles, but all follow the same essential process.

Espresso culture was born in Italy. As love for espresso expanded around the world, skilled and curious baristas began to experiment with how they poured steamed milk — noticing that with practice, they could craft designs out of creamy foam. The first beverage decorated with the iconic rosetta design was poured at Espresso Vivace in Seattle in 1992.

When a customer sees a barista mark a cap of foam with a handcrafted design, they see the high level of care being brought to their beverage. More than ever, customers love sharing pictures of their ornately decorated cups. With the rise of social media, #latteart is inspiring baristas around the globe to master new designs.

Latte art is made possible only with correctly steamed and textured milk. Milk is made up of a complex mix of three components: sugars, fats, and proteins. Each plays an important role in milk steaming.

Before a coffee reaches your store, time and effort have been invested all along the supply chain — farmers, mill workers, quality teams, roasters, and blenders. But one more pair of hands is needed to bring to full life all the beans' quality and rich flavor: yours.

This transformation is a unique responsibility of the barista. Unlike a winemaker who curates flavor from vine to bottle, it is the job of the barista to take what the master roasters and blenders envisioned and — with your own expertise — work that final magic. And it must be done right.

Inside each coffee bean there are many different flavor and aromatic compounds. These are drawn out at different times in the brewing process — some pleasing, others not. This process is called extraction. Coffee is chemically complex — around 900 chemicals are extracted during brewing, and technically about 30% of the roasted bean is water-soluble. But not all that can be extracted should be.

Extraction controls flavor — what flavor compounds are in the cup. Strength controls intensity — how much of those flavors there are, as a ratio of dissolved coffee to water. A typical cup of brewed coffee is only about 1.2% coffee / 98.8% water. A shot of espresso is about 10% coffee / 90% water.

The goal of brewing is to achieve a pleasing balance of both. To reduce strength without altering extraction, add hot water after brewing — this is exactly what an Americano is.