Thinking with Your Palate
Delving into the Complexities of Tasting
by Holly Madrigal
Learning to taste is a skill. When I try, I find myself struggling to describe the sensations happening in my mouth. Try this: Bite into a piece of dark chocolate, say 60% cacao. What do you taste? At first, sweet … chocolatey … Then taste deeper … a hint of bitterness … creamy … Is that a flavor like black coffee or brown sugar?
Tasting is a talent that can be developed and honed like any skill. Some people have become expert tasters, practicing and learning until they can detect quality, difference, and flavor notes. Steve Cuevas is one of those people who has trained his palate to sense slight alterations in flavor and texture. He was, until recently, the head roaster at Black Oak Coffee, and he has become an award-winning “cupper,” meaning that he can taste region, roast level, and quality. He does this by sussing out the acidity, body, and astringency.
Steve started at Black Oak ten years ago working as a barista, and he asked to sit in on the roasting process. Sample roasting introduced him to coffee tastings, where coffee farmers from around the world would send small samples of their beans to be roasted in-house and tested to determine if Black Oak wanted to carry that varietal. Coffee tasting can also be used for quality control and barista training. Steve participated in testing and tastings for a month until he graduated to roasting, which required constant tasting of the finished product to ensure the coffee met Black Oak’s standards.
Steve used to live in San Leandro, where his roommate was learning to roast at a shop called Zocalo. They roasted by sight and smell, noting in a journal the times and temperatures for each roast. Black Oak’s original owners, Jon Frech and Keith Feigin, were trained at Ritual in the Bay Area. “When I came to Black Oak,” Steve explained, “they had a whole other level of data. Here they have a computer that notes factors like the temperature of the roasting beans and the temperature of the air exiting the machine. So we’d have all sorts of nerdy conversations about data.” Steve blended the two methods as he was learning to roast.
On first taste, acidity or bitterness often comes up initially. Astringency, which you can think of as the flavor aspect that makes your mouth pucker, comes after. In small amounts, it adds a wonderful complexity. Hard cider for example really blooms when using apples with a high astringency. Steve marveled that owner Jon has a really good eye, with the ability to identify most regions just by sight. “Just by looking at the beans, he can tell that it comes from Colombia or Ethiopia.”
The industry uses a rating scale for coffee that measures its quality from 0-90 points. Anything that is specialty coffee is over 80, so it is rare that Steve tastes anything below that. He considers anything 88 or above to be something special. He explained, “I never rate anything 90, because that would be a perfect score, and that is not achievable. As a taster, I also know that some things that I love personally are not as popular. We have learned what the customers prefer, and we will roast to what they like.” They have learned that many customers tend to like low acidity, as well as chocolate or nutty notes. Steve continued, “We do light roasted coffee really well, but not everyone likes those. We have a collection of coffees sourced from all over the world.”
There is a process called cupping, where they line up a series of cups, fill each with coffee, and taste each one while recording their nuances. “The year I won the national cup tasters competition in 2017, I was tasting 70 samples a day, three or four days a week. And we might be tasting different countries, or it could be the same country but different farms, or it could be one farm with different parts of the farm, or the same coffee roasted multiple ways,” said Steve. When I asked what goes through his head during these tastings, he added “I am thinking about nothing, keeping my mind open. I try to keep variables the same. I space the cups the same distance apart, I cover the beans so that you don’t have visual cues of color or if it has been washed. It helps that I have bad short-term memory, so even I forget what I put where.”
At these tasting competitions, there are three cups. Contestants taste all three, then set aside the one that is different. Accuracy is the most important factor in scoring, followed by the speed of determination. The most correct wins the competition. Black Oak Coffee won the Golden Bean roasting competition two years in a row. It involves a four-day tasting where they judge how good the coffee is, and how well it expresses the desired traits.
Those who have developed their palates over time can judge with surprising accuracy. I once attended a blind tasting of Alsatian white wines, where the host offered a mix of imported bottles and local wines from Ukiah and Anderson Valley, all hidden within brown paper bags to obscure their origin. A friend tasting with us pinpointed the one that was grown in the deep end of Anderson Valley—she claimed that she could taste the terroir. Owner Keith has a similar tasting skill. “We used to go to wine education nights at a place called Bergamot Alley. They would do these double-blind tastings. Keith could taste where a wine was from. He would say, ‘I think this is from the northern Rhone area, it has the acidity that usually comes from cold climates’ … it was crazy,” Steve shared.
When asked about what traits he tastes first, Steve first pointed out that the taste map of the tongue (salty at the tip, then sweet with sour on the sides, bitter in the back) has been disproven. “I just taste,” he said. He explained that some people are supertasters—they have more papillae in the same amount of tongue space. “[When] I do a training for our new baristas, I do an infusion of nutmeg, because similar to the relation of cilantro to soap, for certain people nutmeg has a similar gross flavor. They have an extra ability to taste another chemical present in nutmeg.” The point is to try to make them think. He puts lime rinds in a water infusion and colors it yellow, then lemon rinds in another and colors it green. “You get acidity with both, but they are different flavors. I want them to evaluate what they are tasting.“
“You may not know that you can do tasting like I do. It can be intimidating. People are kind of shy having opinions of their own,” Steve added, continuing, “I like to help people realize that they can develop their palate and appreciate what they like regardless of popular opinion.” He has been amazed at where his career has taken him. “When I got to do the world championship, I was able to travel to Europe, Paris, Budapest. I was amazed that this skill let me experience a whole other world. We traveled to South Korea, and they were eating bugs so I had to give it a try. I like to taste different things,” he added with a smile. “Of course, there are times that I am just eating and the flavor is pass or fail. You just want a taco or a burger. But then there are times when I want to be thoughtful, to taste thoughtfully. I think about texture and flavors. I’m a very textural person.”
When asked what he is excited about at the moment, Steve mentioned that some farms are experimenting with fruit. Coffee comes from a cherry, which is added to a water tank and sometimes fermented slightly before removing the hull and drying before roasting. Some growers add fruit and wine yeast to the water tank at that stage, particularly producers in Panama, Guatemala, and Ethiopia. “It is a big gamble to do this to your beans because some buyers may not like this style. The price of coffee is a big determinant as well. Some growers cannot afford to take risks if the price of the coffee would go up significantly. But I enjoy it,” said Steve.
Black Oak used to have a tasting chart displayed, its rainbow colors catching the eye. “The outer ring is fruit, and then the inner ring narrows it down to tropical or apple. Or the outer ring might be chocolate, then narrows down to milk chocolate, dark chocolate, and baker’s chocolate, narrowing down what you might be tasting. It is a tool to help you think about what you are tasting,” said Steve. “That is kind of how I taste.” He added, “It’s acidic . . . it’s sweet . . . then I taste for body. This is very bright and acidic, I might think lemon, but then if it is acidic and sweet, then I might move more towards white grapes or green apple. Together, flavors combine to create different perceptions of things.”
Steve encourages tasters to try to pick out notes, think about what they are tasting, and then convey that experience, explaining, “Descriptions of things are so subjective. For example, if I gave you three coffees, all are identical but the body of each is different. You would say that the sweetness level and the type of sugar are different. The lighter body might taste like white sugar, a thicker body might be molasses or brown sugar. So the words we use to describe the coffee can better convey what the taste is like.” Some coffees have a thicker mouthfeel, similar to wines (red wines generally have a thicker mouthfeel and whites a lighter one).
Professionals may need to taste not for their particular preferences, but for a wider audience. Skilled tasters may pursue becoming a sommelier for the wine industry and fine dining, or a taster of craft sake, pursuing the distinction of sake master. As the legal cannabis industry has progressed, a group has developed a Ganjier™ program. These tasters can separate and describe the particulars of cannabis strains, flavors, and notes. I personally envy the coveted position of cheesemonger, rating the creaminess, the funkiness, and the sharp tang of different fromages.
Developing these preferences for yourself may take a lifetime of discernment. Tasting with intention and study will allow your personal palate to evolve. Exploring what you like takes time, but it is an effort worth the journey.
Black Oak Coffee Roasters
476 N. State St., Ukiah
(866) 390-1427 | BlackOakCoffee.com
Open daily 6am - 6pm
Holly Madrigal is a Mendocino County maven who loves to share the delights of our region. She’s fortunate to enjoy her meaningful work as the director of the Leadership Mendocino program and takes great joy in publishing this magazine.
Photo by Josh Bowers
