Sensory training?

Anyone has sensory training that they can share? Like how acidic or how to differentiate types of flavour, i like to do one with my friends need a guide on how too conduct one

I was just thinking of posting this topic the other day! Guess you beat me to it!

I remember asking this question to one of the roasters in Melbourne, during a public cupping session they held.
One of the ways they told me to improve your palate was to just grab some fruits or any other food and to taste them.

So for fruits; grab some oranges, limes, lemons, grapefruits, mangoes, peaches, apples etc and just taste them and write own your thoughts.
For other types of food; chocolates (the various degrees of dark and milk), caramels, sugar (white vs brown), honey, steak :wink: and again just noting down how you taste them? That was the advice given to me.

I suppose it’s really just taking your time to analyse how the tastes are, training your palate and then writing it down in your own words which, will then help you to communicate the flavours you are tasting in your coffee.

Since then I’ve found a few other resources on ā€˜Training your palate for coffee’ on the internet.

http://www.jimseven.com/2009/10/16/8-steps-to-develop-your-coffee-palate/

James Hoffman’s guide, which dates back to 2009, is still a good guide in my opinion. Essentially buying two different types of coffee (or more if you would like :slight_smile: ) and brewing them side by side. Important thing to note is perhaps the practice of having a Point of Reference’, whereby you take one specific coffee and compare it to another different coffee. Blindly tasting without a point of reference makes it hard to hone in on a specific taste profile to compare others with.

http://blog.mistobox.com/blog/2016/04/13/tasting-coffee-how-to-train-your-palate-and-build-your-coffee-tasting-vocabulary/

Another guide which I like is that from Mistobox. Again, taking different types of food and tasting them, comparing the different varieties in that given food type

" Chocolate – milk chocolate, baker’s, semi-sweet, dark, cocoa powder
Nuts – almonds, cashews, peanuts, walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts"

http://legacy.sweetmarias.com/library/node/2931

And then there’s Sweet Maria’s guide, which is pretty detailed and fun to carry out, as well!

Hope this helps! Would love to hear if any one has any other guides or tips!

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Thanks for the tips! Time to try that, myself

For acids, you can get the ā€œOrganic Acids Taste Kitā€ (I don’t know why they kept calling it that way as the phosphoric one is not organic) developed by Joseph A. Rivera who co-develop the Q-Certification program. This are the same used for the Q Grade exam and includes citric, acetic, malic and phosphoric, all food grade.

https://www.coffeechemistry.com/shop/acids-kit/student-organic-acids-kit

Hi Octavio when we first launched the Organic Acids class during the 2001 SCAA conference, we only used 3 organic acids, namely citric, malic, and acetic acid. But as we expanded the course we later added phosphoric acid and it was eventually included as part of the Q-Grader certification. However from 2001 to about 2009 the class was always listed on the SCAA Skill Building program as ā€œOrganic Acids Profilingā€ or sometimes as ā€œThe Chemistry of Organic Acidsā€ so the name eventually stuck even though its 75% correct (3/4).