I felt like there was a lot of "reinventing the wheel" now, and I recently saw a news about a large-scale multi-month project funded by AgriFutures, an Australian agricultural development funding agency, in part to define the terroir of Australian coffee to increase demand and investment in Australian-grown coffee. At the same time, this research paper was also published in the Journal of Sensory Research, and today I will talk to you about it in combination with the research paper and the final content of the wheel.
In recent years, the term "coffee terroir" has been mentioned frequently, and originally the term terroir was more associated with wine, a bit like the well-known "geographical indication", which refers to the "local taste" of the product. Coffee is also a crop, and the terroir varies from place to place, and the exact definition of different crops may vary. But for coffee, in addition to the terroir of the place where it is grown, it also includes the processing and processing of coffee, which actually has regional characteristics, so the researchers wanted to combine the Australian terroir and explicitly describe the coffee signature wheel as a tool to more closely link coffee characteristics to the terroir, aiming to more thoroughly describe or identify coffees with the concept of terroir.
With all that said, let's take a look at what this feature wheel looks like. Conceptually similar to the familiar Flavor Wheel, it is both a sensory analysis tool, but the advantage over the traditional Flavor Wheel is that it defines the terms used to assess acidity, mouthfeel and aftertaste in a more granular and concrete way. We all know that coffee's acidity, mouthfeel, and finish characteristics are part of the industry-standard evaluation, and in this study, the terms used to describe coffee acidity, mouthfeel, and finish were collated from published literature, internet materials, and more, with a total of 679 unique sensory terms identified as acidity, mouthfeel, and finish. According to lexical relationships and usage, acidity, mouthfeel, aftertaste and shared terms are reduced to 95, and the condensed terms are arranged on a coffee characteristic wheel, which means that it is a concise list of terms.
For example, in the traditional flavor wheel, the flavor of coffee is described as having the flavor of berries, and blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, etc., but the description of what part of the senses corresponds to these berries is not expressed. For example, you can see in the acidity of coffee that the acidity of apples, berries, drupes, and grapes are used to describe the acidity of coffee; Lingeringly, etc., there will be specific descriptive words to systematize the description of sensory evaluation, so that the relationship between the strength and weakness of the expression in the description creates a correspondence, thus helping to create a universal language around the role of coffee.