Coffee tasting notes are the words a roaster picked to describe what the coffee tasted like to them: mango, star anise, brown sugar. Nothing was added to the beans, so it isn't flavored coffee. It's a description, not an ingredient panel. What's worth knowing is where those words came from, and why one bag carries three and another seven.
Key takeaways
- A tasting note is a descriptor, not an ingredient: nothing has been added to the coffee, and a bag that lists mango is not mango-flavored.
- The words come off a vocabulary that was written down in advance. The World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon identifies 110 flavor, aroma and texture attributes present in coffee and provides references for measuring their intensity.
- How many notes a bag carries is a house decision rather than a measurement, and our own five coffees carry three, five, five, six and seven.
- A note list is best used to hold one coffee against another before you buy, which is the one job it does reliably.
A tasting note describes the coffee, it doesn't list what went into it
Start with the question underneath the question. If a bag says sarsaparilla and banana milk, did somebody put sarsaparilla in it? No. Nothing goes into a bag of our coffee except roasted coffee. Those two words sit on our Organic Peru Decaf, and they're there because that's what the cup reminded somebody of.
The question isn't naive, either. Flavored coffee is a real category, sold in the same aisle, and it does exactly what its name says: it coats a roasted bean with an oil or an extract until the bean smells like hazelnut. On a shelf, that bag and ours look the same. They're making opposite claims. One is telling you what got added. The other is telling you what somebody found already there.
So what is a note, precisely? It's a comparison. Coffee doesn't own words for most of what it does, so whoever writes the bag reaches for the nearest thing they have ever tasted that shares the shape of it. Sarsaparilla isn't in the cup. Something in the cup behaves the way sarsaparilla behaves: sweet root, faintly medicinal, dark rather than bright.
That makes the list sharply useful in one direction and useless in another. It won't tell you whether you'll enjoy the coffee, because it isn't a rating and nobody wrote it with your morning in mind. It will tell you how this coffee sits next to that one. Open two bags from our drip shelf and read their lists against each other, and you'll learn more in ten seconds than either list gives you alone.
The words come off a vocabulary somebody else already wrote down
You've probably seen the Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel, the color chart with berry and citrus and cereal fanning out from a hub. Most explanations of this subject reproduce the wheel and stop there. The wheel isn't the source. It's a picture of one.
Underneath it sits the World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon, which identifies 110 flavor, aroma and texture attributes present in coffee, and provides references for measuring their intensity. WCR describes it as "the basis for a revised Coffee Flavor Taster's Wheel." Lexicon 2.0 was published in October 2017, which is a stranger fact than it sounds: the vocabulary printed on your bag has a version number and a release date.
The word doing the work there is references. The lexicon doesn't only name attributes; Lexicon 2.0 lists 24 of them with globally available references. That's a vocabulary you can calibrate against something, rather than one you take on faith. Ordinary flavor language doesn't work that way. Tell a friend a wine tastes like leather and nobody hands you the leather.
Which means choosing a note is a different act from writing down an impression. The writer isn't inventing language — they're choosing from a set that somebody standardized on purpose, with a document behind it and a stated reason for existing. WCR says the purpose is to advance our understanding of coffee quality and how it is created. That's why brown sugar turns up on bags from companies who've never spoken to each other, and why "kind of sweet, you know?" turns up on none of them.
None of that makes the choice mechanical, and we're not going to pretend it does. A person still decides which words fit, and no instrument catches them if they reach badly. But the vocabulary itself isn't a mood. It's a document with a date on it, and you can go read it.
How many notes a bag carries is a decision, not a measurement
Here's the half of this that nobody publishes. Count what's printed on the five coffees we can sell today and the numbers don't settle down. ASCENT carries three. El Salvador Finca San Luis carries five. Organic Peru Decaf carries five. Kenya Kiambu carries six. Ethiopia Buku Abel carries seven.
Five coffees, five different lengths — and nothing anywhere measures that difference. The lexicon doesn't set the number. The wheel doesn't set it. No grading system in the trade asks for it. Seven notes doesn't make Buku Abel twice the coffee ASCENT is; it means one write-up stopped later than the other.
Once you've seen that, a comparison you were probably making quietly falls apart. A longer list isn't a more complex coffee and a shorter list isn't a simpler one. Counting the notes on two bags compares two authors, not two coffees. If you want the length to mean something, the thing it means is how much the person writing felt like saying.
Our ASCENT page is the honest one about this, and mostly by accident. It doesn't say the coffee is burnt sugar, citrus fruit and juicy sweets. It says: "We taste: burnt sugar, citrus fruit, and juicy sweets." Three words, first person, and a subject doing the tasting. That's what every note list on every bag actually is, whether or not the bag says so out loud.
You can check the spread yourself. The single origin shelf puts all five lists a click apart, and reading them in a row takes about a minute. And if what you're now wondering is who does the tasting in the first place, that's a separate piece and we've written it: what a coffee cupping score is measured against.
Questions we get about coffee tasting notes
Is coffee with tasting notes flavored coffee?
No. Nothing is added to the beans, and a note list describes what somebody tasted rather than what went in. Flavored coffee is a separate product, made by coating roasted beans with an oil or an extract, and it is sold to you as flavored coffee. If a bag says apricot and declares no flavoring, the apricot is a comparison, not an ingredient.
Where do coffee tasting notes come from?
They come from somebody tasting the coffee, and from a vocabulary that was written down before they got there. The words are not free invention: the World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon identifies 110 flavor, aroma and texture attributes present in coffee and provides references for measuring their intensity, and WCR describes that lexicon as the basis for a revised Coffee Flavor Taster's Wheel.
Who decides the tasting notes on a bag of coffee?
The roaster does. No outside body approves a note list, there is no filing and no appeal, and nothing obliges two companies to describe the same origin the same way. That is why the words are worth reading as choices a person made rather than as a specification, and why one coffee can reach two shelves carrying two different sets of words.
What is the difference between tasting notes and a flavor profile?
A note list is the specific words; a flavor profile is the general shape those words add up to. Notes are the individual descriptors printed on the bag, like dried date or brown sugar. A profile is the one-breath summary: heavy and chocolatey, or bright and floral. Profiles are easier to shop by. Notes are more precise about what you are looking for.
Do two roasters ever describe the same coffee differently?
Constantly. Two companies can buy from the same lot, roast it to a similar color, and publish lists that share barely a word, because each list is one set of people choosing from a large vocabulary. Neither has to be wrong. The lexicon holds 110 attributes and nothing in it says which of them a given cup has earned.
Read the words first, then brew the coffee
If you want to feel this whole argument inside one cup, our Organic Peru Decaf is the coffee to do it with. Its page publishes five notes, and two of them, sarsaparilla and banana milk, are the strangest words we've put in print. Read them before you brew, not to audit the cup against the list afterward, but to find out what somebody meant by sarsaparilla. Those five words are on the page before you buy, and they'll be the same five when the bag reaches your counter. That's the one job a note list does reliably: it hands you something specific to look for, in words a person was willing to sign their name under.
