How to be a better coffee taster

James Harper: So, back in the summer, I went to Paris. You know, I have a French girlfriend, so occasionally we visit the capital of France. And while she was out and about doing her business meetings, I was like... I'm gonna check out the local specialty coffee scene. So, I hopped on my bike, whizzed down the cobblestone lanes, swerved out of the way of a speeding ambulance, and parked up my bike outside a well known specialty cafe. I walked in, and the barista asked me, “What would you like?” And I say, “I don't know, what's good?” “Colombia.” But this is an experimental coffee where the producer had put passion fruit, like literal passion fruit juice, into the vat during the fermentation process. I was like, “Sure, give me a cup of that.” And when I put this cup to my lips, I have this explosion of flavor in my mouth. My tongue tingles with passion fruit. I feel passion fruit juice against my cheeks. I might as well have been biting into a passion fruit. I swallow. The taste of those flavors subsided, and then I realized something, although it tasted like I had a passion fruit in my mouth, it's actually not where I was perceiving passion fruit, my brain was playing a trick on me.

I thought back to a conversation I had with Professor Janice Wang, a sensory researcher, about a year ago, where she explained to me, “Look, we can only perceive some basic tastes in our mouth: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami. But the vast majority of the richness of our flavor experience comes from aromas,” and for example, that note of passion fruit I tasted – passion fruit is not a taste, it's an aroma, and aromas are perceived in an entirely separate compartment of my face. Behind your eyes is a compartment of your face called the nasal cavity. Quite large actually, big enough to hold a sliced up plum. And there, lining the top of it, is our olfactory epithelium, basically where our aroma receptors are. That there, my olfactory epithelium, is where I was sensing the passion fruit, not in my mouth, but I could have sworn the flavors were in my mouth.

That is the trick our brain plays on us. Because you are sensing coffee on your tongue, tasting it, your brain's like, “Well, I'm going to trick you into thinking that that's also where you're tasting the aroma,” which is not the case. The aroma is being picked up in an entirely separate compartment of my face. This is one of the many surprising and fascinating things I discovered when I began exploring how our sense of smell and taste actually works. And that's what I'm going to present to you in this episode. I've been speaking with some of the world's best tasting professionals and leading taste and smell scientists. I'm going to take you through how your sense of smell and taste works, and use these insights to help you be a better coffee taster. Becoming a better taster helps you enjoy coffee more.

We're better able to appreciate things like processing, coffee varieties, regions, roasting styles, brewing styles. When we taste those subtleties, our coffee experiences become so much more interesting. Fun. And in the next episode, I'm going to explore a more metaphysical question. Like when you and I drink the same exact coffee, how is your experience of the coffee flavors different from my experience of those flavors?

This episode is sponsored by Marco Beverage Systems. Marco creates coffee making equipment for cafes and in this and the next episode, I use Marco's SP9 coffee brewer to brew the same coffee very consistently, because I've been doing my own sensory experiments to showcase how, when it comes to our sense of taste and smell, it is really weird, surprising and really, really fun.

James Harper: I'm James Harper and this is The Science of Coffee, a spinoff series from my coffee podcast Filter Stories and a journey into coffee's hidden microscopic secrets.

So to start off, I want to show you how our sense of taste works, our tongue perceives flavors. And to do that, I want to present to you a mystery that none of us have the answer to yet. And this mystery is fundamental to people like you and me, people who like specialty coffee, because the mystery is sweetness. Sweetness is so important to specialty coffee. It's in the coffee competition scoring criteria, from cafes to roasteries, to importers, to farmers. Sweetness is a key criteria for determining how good a coffee is, and when we drink some of the most prized specialty coffee beans, filter, black, no sugar, no milk, they are by themselves, very, very sweet.

But here's the weird thing: That sweetness isn't coming from sugar. In black filter coffee naturally there is a tiny tiny little bit of sugar, but it is so small. If I gave you a glass of water with just a fraction of sugar in it, it would not taste sweet to you, you wouldn't tell the difference between that and regular water. So this is the mystery. There is something in delicious specialty coffee that makes it taste really sweet to us. That isn't sugar. Now, like with any good mystery, we have a theory, a theory that I wanted to try out for myself. So back in June 2023 I attended The World of Coffee, a trade show organized by the specialty coffee association and it took place in this huge convention center.

Right next door to Athens airport in Greece on a really, really hot morning, I walked into the crisp cold air of the convention center, strolled past security down a couple of halls and onto the trade floor and I found the stand for Marco Beverage Systems. Marco manufactures professional brewing equipment for cafes. And on the stand, I met a lovely guy called Rene, their EU sales manager. Rene helped me brew up many, many batches of the same coffee using Marco's SP9 brewer. So, we had all these flasks of coffee, all brewed the same, and I took out of my pocket a bit of white powder and a little flask, like a vial with a pipette. And then a few hours later some guinea pigs arrived. I did a call out on my Filter Stories Instagram saying, “Hey, who wants to join in on a tasting experiment?” and some very, very brave people turned up. Now, the first pot they tasted was regular filter coffee, nothing fancy. So, you know, typical response. And then I served the pots of coffee, which I had adulterated with these drops of liquid and a bit of white powder.

But no, I hadn't added sugars – I added artificial sweeteners. So it is possible to make a coffee sweet without adding sugar. But how does that work? Why can't our tongue tell the difference between sugar, and some random chemical? To answer these questions, I got on the phone with a legend in the world of taste science, Professor Linda Bartoshuk.

Linda Bartoshuk: I did my PhD on water, pure water, taste of it.

James Harper: She's the director for psychophysical research at the University of Florida's Center for Taste and Smell, but to be honest, when I set up a call with her... I actually hadn't appreciated how much of a legend she really is, and it only began to dawn on me during the interview. Because for example, she dropped a hint as to how long she's been a scientist.

Linda Bartoshuk: And Lord Adrian was the teacher of Carl Hoffman, who was my…

James Harper: Her professor was taught by a guy called Lord Adrian. And I'm thinking to myself, what century are we talking about here?

Linda Bartoshuk: I mean, I'm 84. I've been around for a very long time.

James Harper: Google Scholar tells me that Linda Bartoshuk has been involved in more than 300 publications, over 20,000 citations. Anyway, so as I'm chatting to Linda, I mentioned to her this mystery about sweetness in black filter coffee, and she immediately comes up with an explanation, a theory.

Linda Bartoshuk: Probably got something in it that stimulates some type of site on the sugar sweet receptor.

James Harper: But I was still confused. How do our sweet receptors work? Where even are they in our mouths? Linda then grabbed my hand, figuratively speaking, and pulled me down, deep inside our tongues, and explained how it all works. First things first: Get your phone, turn on the selfie camera, stick out your tongue and take a good long look. If you're in a crowded environment and you're getting stares, just tell everybody that you're hearing a guy's voice in your head and you're following his orders. They'll understand. Now, as you zoom in on your tongue, you'll probably notice quite a few bumps across it.

Linda Bartoshuk: Those are papillae.

James Harper: Let's shrink ourselves down microscopically and dive in, we're aiming towards the tip of your tongue. As we get closer to the surface, we see a field of giant mushrooms coming up, kind of.

Linda Bartoshuk: If you take a fungiform papilla, they're shaped like little button mushrooms. If you enlarge one, it's got a stock coming up out of the tongue and this sort of rounded…

James Harper: We keep falling and aim for the space in between the mushrooms. We rush past the stem of the mushroom and splash into a lake of saliva. We turn on our headlamps and then swim underwater and there we see a channel that goes even further down. We swim down these channels and we find ourselves in an underwater cave. And they're swaying in this dark sea of saliva. We find sweet taste receptors. We have what looks like string, sewed into the floor a couple of times.

Linda Bartoshuk: It crosses the membrane, it goes down and out, down and out seven times.

James Harper: And then branching off swaying in the saliva are what look like two scrunched up metal scouring pads connected together.

Linda Bartoshuk: What it is is two special proteins. They sit together on the membrane and they twist together now, looking around this undersea cave, we see these weirdly shaped sugar molecules floating around us: sucrose, fructose, and glucose, which are the three sugars we need biologically,

James Harper: And as they float past, they get ensnared in this twisty tiny messy scouring pad that stimulates the sweet receptor, which then tells us, “Hey, this thing's sweet.”

So that's how our receptors work with sugar. But here's the thing: sugar molecules are actually quite big, weirdly shaped, things. And those scouring pads floating in the sea of saliva are pretty big themselves and have a lot of twists and turns in them. Which is where other molecules, which are not sugar, can come along and get stuck in them too.

Linda Bartoshuk: It turns out there are other sensitive spots on it that other molecules can bind, and those other things produce a sweet taste.

James Harper: Alright, so let's get back to this mystery of black filter coffee tasting sweet. One of the leading theories is that, well, maybe there's something in good specialty coffee, that, you know, it's not sugar, it's not an artificial sweetener, but it's some kind of molecule, just happens to bind to our sweet receptors. Peter Giuliano, the chief research officer at the Coffee Science Foundation, told me that a scientist is looking into this right now.

Peter Giuliano: Dr. Nancy Cordova is doing some research at Ohio State University supported by the Coffee Science Foundation, and it's her mission to figure out…

James Harper: What is causing the sensation of sweetness in coffee?

Peter Giuliano: No, I should say, although this sweet taste receptor theory is a leading theory, it's not the only one she's investigating. The second hypothesis that we're also investigating is the multimodal hypothesis. So that is that something you're smelling, for example, the smell of vanilla can create the impression of sweetness even when nothing sweet exists in the food. The third hypothesis is that some other flavor, like for example, bitterness may create the perception of sweetness in its absence. So you can think of sweetness as being sort of inverse bitterness if you're expecting to taste bitterness, but you don't. Or if it's not bitter, then it must be sweet.

James Harper: No one knows at this stage which of these theories is correct. Maybe none of them, maybe all of them. Whatever it is, I'll be sure to tell you as soon as we figure it out. So, I've just taken you on a deep dive into how our sweet receptors work in our tongues, and quick note, all our taste receptors work in different ways and they're not all in the same place. They're scattered throughout our tongue and in different parts of our mouths, but you have an idea of how it works, which is important because I'm now going to show you a very curious phenomena that has really helped me become a better coffee taster as soon as I realized what was actually going on. So many of us in professional coffee, we taste many coffees side by side. You have to, it's the best way to learn. Contrast two different coffees side by side, but there's a mistake that I often make, and I have seen many people, especially in coffee make themselves, which compromises what we're tasting. It can lead us to tasting things incorrectly. So the other day, I got two jugs of water. In the first, I added a gram of citric acid, then in the second jug I added a gram of citric acid, like in the first jug and then also 12 grams of sugar and then I performed the test on an unsuspecting friend of mine. So first Jack took a sip from that jug where I had only added acidity.

Jack Butcher: It wasn't like, shrivel your mouth out sour, or acidity. But it got your taste buds tingling.

James Harper: And then immediately after, he took a sip of that second jug where I had added citric acid and sugar.

Jack Butcher: I tasted a lot more sweetness.

James Harper: And what's amazing is that that acidity, that sourness, almost disappeared.

Jack Butcher: I didn't taste the sour. It didn't come through as much. It didn't set my tongue or tingle like the first time around.

James Harper: But here's the thing, both jugs had the same amount of citric acid. And then I asked them to repeat that tasting, with one change, after sipping that acidic water, rinse your mouth out with water, and then take a sip of that sweet sour combination. and when he rinsed his mouth out, the acidity didn't disappear.

Jack Butcher: Equally as acidic.

James Harper: It came through as strong as before. And that is actually the truth. Both solutions are equally acidic. It's just that when you don't rinse your mouth out with water, you sometimes can't perceive the acidity when you're doing back to back tastings. But, why is that? There are two theories.

The first theory is about our receptors and the second is about our brain, So, Theory No. 1: Taste receptors. Let's think back to those deep, dark, underwater caves in our tongues where our taste receptors are. So, in that first round of tasting, Jack took a sip of that acidic water and all those acids went down into the chasms of his tongue and filled up his sour receptors and then when he took a sip of the sweet sour mixture, those sour receptors were still blocked up and along comes sugars and then they activate the sugar receptors and then it tastes to him basically only sweet. Of course when he drinks some water in between the tastings, that citric acid is washed off his receptors, and they're now available again to pick up new acids in the water. So that's one theory. Now the second theory has to do with our brains and the fact that it prioritizes when things change, so when you sip the acidic water from that first jug. your brain goes, wow, that's so sour. Your brain's now in sour mode. It's like, okay, we are in a sour food world right now. And so when you then drink the sweet sour mixture, your brain's like, hmm, I don't need to tell you that this solution is sour, because we're in the sweet sour world, but there's sweetness here, so look, you need to be aware now that something has changed. We are now in a world of sweetness as well.

This is absolutely a real effect, and it works across many different flavors: sweetness, bitterness, sourness, saltiness, even aromas massively impact your coffee experience if you're doing back to back tastings of different coffees. Imagine you're tasting two coffees, side by side. The first one, very sweet. The second one, sweet and sour. But, if you didn't rinse your mouth out in between with water, you would say that the first coffee was sweet, and the second coffee was sour. But actually, the second coffee was sweet and sour, you just weren't able to taste it. And so what I do now is when I'm tasting coffees side by side, I take a sip of water in between because that helps reset my head. I'm able to fully perceive the flavors that are there in a coffee and not underestimate how sweet or aromatic or sour it actually is. If you want to, you could even take this further. In controlled food science experiments at universities they ask their taste participants to wait sometimes four minutes between tastings. Now, I am nowhere near that patient, but I have found that even just taking a sip of water massively helps.

Okay, so let's move on now from our tongues to our nose.

When it comes to coffee, like almost all food and drinks, what we perceive in our nose is so much more enriching than what we perceive on our tongues. Don't believe me, alright. Look, get a cup of coffee. Pinch your nose and then sip your coffee. What are you getting? I'm getting a bit of warmth on my tongue. Uh, slight bitterness. But when I open my nose, I'm getting notes of fruit, nuts, and chocolate.

And now here's another one of those really surprising, magical things I discovered about our sense of smell. Humidity can change how well you smell. And I learned this speaking with Mandy Moglich.

Mandy Naglich: I am a food and beverage journalist and the author of How to Taste.

James Harper: Nancy's book, How to Taste, was a really, really great read. It explains how our sense of taste and smell works, but also how to taste and appreciate food and drinks better. Nancy herself is a professional taster, and has many certifications under her belt.

Mandy Naglich: Including my advanced Cicerone, a certified taster certification from Roxa, and my WCET and SPIRITS, along with many others.

James Harper: During our conversation, Nancy told me this story about a time she did a tasting exam in Chicago.

Mandy Naglich: I flew to Chicago. I was staying in a very dry hotel room.

And I just could not understand why I felt like… I had done all of this training, I knew all my compounds and style aromas very well. And I was trading in the hotel room before I took the exam the night before. And I was like, why can't I smell anything? And looking back, I think you get out of a very dry plane, you come to a very dry hotel room. And it's just, you're losing all of that moisture.

James Harper: So I got curious to understand, how does moisture in the air affect our ability to smell? I got my answer when I hopped on the phone with Joel Mainland.

Joel Mainland: I'm a member at Monell Chemical Senses Center, a nonprofit where everybody studies taste and smell.

James Harper: And at the center, they do really cool things like using machine learning to understand smells better.

Joel Mainland: So, we work with some people at Google to do this. They had built a model that looks at molecular structure and predicts what it smells like.

James Harper: Who better than to explain how our sense of smell actually works and why it works better in moist humid environments. And so anyway, let's start with the basics. What is a smell? Imagine you're walking down the road. It's a hot day, sun beating down and you see a rotting banana, happily decomposing on the hot pavement. Now that banana is made up of many, many different things: carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins, potassium, so many different things. But for something to be a smell, that compound, it has to get off the banana.

Joel Mainland: So if you're a molecule on a banana and you want to be smelled first, you have to leave the banana, right? So that molecule has to be light enough to leave the banana and float in the air.

James Harper: So this little aromatic banana compound is light enough to be swept up in the air. As we breathe in, it's hoovered up through our nostrils and lands in a film of thick gooey mucus at the top of our nasal cavity, that separate compartment of your face that's behind your eyes, above your mouth, where we actually smell things.

Joel Mainland: And to get to the receptors, you have to get into that mucus.

James Harper: That aroma molecule dissolves into the mucus. And then it jiggles around, Joel's words, not mine, until it hits one of our smell receptors lining the top of the nasal cavity.

Joel Mainland: Once they bind to that receptor, they activate that receptor and that sends signals onto the rest of the brain that you interpret as smells.

James Harper: So the point is, to be able to smell better, you need to have a…

Mandy Naglich: …thick, healthy, delicious layer of mucus.

James Harper: The problem when it's all dried out is that there's just less of a glide path, it's harder for an aroma molecule to jiggle its way up to your aroma receptors. So it's important to have a thick, healthy layer of mucus. And speaking with Nancy, it was really quite shocking to me how easy it is to dry out your mucus and compromise your ability to smell.

Mandy Naglich: You always see in like stock photos, it looks like people are taking these big, deep inhales of whatever they're smelling. It's usually wine in stock photos. But that's just not how you want to do it because if you dry out that nasal cavity and lose that layer of mucus, it's going to be really hard for you to sense a lot of different odorant compounds and differentiate them.

James Harper: So next time you're smelling a cup of coffee don't do this over and over again. I mean it's funny, I can literally feel the cooling, drying effect up there in my nasal cavity every time I do that. No, no, don't do that. Instead, just take shorter sniffs. Another thing you can do is avoid environments which are very dry. Mandy is so concerned about it, she has invested in a pocket solution.

Mandy Naglich: Yeah, I have this little travel humidifier now that fits in a cup holder in a car.

James Harper: And the final tip she offered me is just good advice, generally.

Mandy Naglich: Hydration is the best thing you can do. So, when you wake up in the morning, if you chug something like this size…

James Harper: It's like a liter of water.

Mandy Naglich: Uh, yeah, it's exactly a liter.

James Harper: Okay, so now, I want to talk about why it is so hard to perceive aromas in coffee. Even today, and I've been in specialty coffee now for a decade or more, I don't know how many coffees I've tasted in my life, and I sometimes struggle to be like, uh, what's this aroma, is this, is it fruity, uh, what kind of fruit, I'm not sure. Identifying aromas in coffee, it's hard. And I want to show you why it's so hard by deconstructing how we even identify an aroma in the first place. So, let's say you have a cup of coffee in front of you. A cloud of aromas wafts up from the cup. So many different types of aromas.

Joel Mainland: You'll find hundreds of different molecules in there at various concentrations.

James Harper: Now, interestingly, there is one specific aroma that tells us, yep, this is coffee.

Joel Mainland: A molecule called furcapin. It's a sulfur free molecule. It smells really bad at high concentrations, but if you get it down to very low concentrations, you'll sort of smell it and that's bad coffee. Right.

James Harper: But there's so much more to coffee than that one note, you know? There's a hint of blueberry, a hint of jasmine, a hint of chocolate. Why is it so difficult to describe those subtleties? Okay, so, what happens is, you smell a coffee. This cloud of different aroma molecules at different concentrations. They rush into your nasal cavity, get into the mucus at the top of this chamber behind our eyes then activate a mind boggling number of receptors.

Joel Mainland: Millions of receptors.

James Harper: And a huge array of receptors.

Joel Mainland: Around 350 types of receptors.

James Harper: And then somehow we have to make sense of these complex signals. This is particularly tricky in coffee because imagine, let's say the aroma of mango. If we were biting into a mango right now, the aromas would waft up, and let's just say it hits three different receptors. Those receptors say, okay, yep, these all are activated, and this therefore means it's a mango. Okay? But in coffee, we're not getting that full clear mango note. Only receptors one and two are being activated maybe. That third one isn't. And then it's up to our brains to be like, huh, uh, ooh, what is, it's kinda like something I know, but not quite. This is where the brain has to fill in missing pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle. To understand this better, I spoke with Dr. Fabiana Cavallo. She's a neuroscientist turned coffee researcher.

Fabiana Carvalho: So the brain must fill in the gap in order to recognize something as blueberry or orange or et cetera. So when we drink a fruity coffee, there are aromas in that cloud that activate most, but not all of the receptors that would normally tell us, "Hmm, I'm smelling mango."

James Harper: And it's up to the brain to fill in the gaps. Now people who taste coffee professionally and do it a lot, they're able to take in this complete picture of a mango aromatic and be like, "It tastes like mango to me." Because their internal prediction models are really good.

Fabiana Carvalho: We perceive things in the world by means of what we call internal models in neuroscience. So I have internal statistical models of how things are in the world. Like I've seen several coffee cups and then I have this abstract, internal model about what is a coffee cup. So from my prior knowledge, the brain approaches the world by means of probability. So given what I know about coffee cups, what is the probability of this object in front of me to be a coffee cup? It's the same faction, given what I know about the blueberry smell, what is the probability of this scent I'm sensing right now from the coffee to be a blueberry smell.

James Harper: And I gotta say, even today, it's so impressive to me when I see a coffee professional take a sip of coffee where I'm like, "uh, kind of tastes fruity" and they're like, "it has this note, that note." I saw it for myself in Athens at the Marco's Beverages stand. Bram, one of my brave tasters, his job relies on him tasting coffee. How many coffees have I tasted in my life? Individual coffees maybe 10,000 to 12,000 coffees so far. And I was just in awe at his internal prediction models picking up on all these different flavors. And the really cool thing is you too can be as skilled as Bram is at identifying coffee flavors, all you have to do is develop your internal prediction models. And coming right up, tasting professional Mandy Naglich gave me three tips that have got me practicing developing my internal prediction models, which I want to share with you, so that we can be as good as Bram is at identifying coffee flavors without having to drink 12, 000 coffees. So, in the evenings, before I fell asleep, I read Mandy Naglish's excellent book, How to Taste. It's full of cultural insights, stories and tips on how to taste better, but for me three things in particular jumped out at me.

The three ways that I've taken on board to become, and it's funny, since doing these three things, it has brought a lot more fun, joy to my life. Now listen, I wasn't in a bad place or anything, but when you really begin to concentrate on the flavor and aroma of everything around us, of the foods we eat, the places we visit, it adds a deeper dimension to my life. It's kind of like when you stop listening to your favorite song on your phone's speakers, and you put on some really good headphones instead.

Okay, so here they are. Tip number one. When you take a sip of coffee, breathe out. So, there are two pathways that an aroma can get to your aroma receptors. One is through your nostrils when you take a sniff. Technically that's called orthonasal olfaction. But the second way is when you take a sip and you breathe out, so those aromas go from the back of your throat into your nasal cavity and into the mucus that way. This is technically called retronasal olfaction. The aromas you pick up on as you breathe out, they can be really intense, and surprising. When you're listening to the scales on a piano, right? Someone's playing the same scale up over and over and over again. Sounds exactly the same. You can think of those as your olfactory receptors, right? Every time you orthonasally sniff something up your nose, you're getting that exact same scale.

Mandy Naglich: The olfactory receptors are being played like notes on a keyboard. So if you go out of your way to focus on smelling from the back of your nose, it's almost like playing that same piano scale backward, right? It's all the same notes, but it just has a different feeling when you're playing down your scales instead of up. Um, and you're kind of can think of playing those olfactory receptors backward, you might pick up something new just because of the way it's like a little different playing that backwards.

James Harper: Tip number one, when you take a sip of coffee, breathe out. Okay. Tasting tip number two. Sit and synthesize.

Mandy Naglich: So as far as becoming a better taster, so much of it is about just focusing on what you're tasting all the time, whether you realize it or not, but focusing on it is what allows you to turn it from just an experience into a skill.

James Harper: When you take a sip of coffee, just sit there and reflect on it, like a little meditation. To take it a little bit further, aromas can be hard to memorize, especially aromas in coffee, which are not crystal clear. So one way to remember these flavors that you're meditating on is to also focus on how you're feeling your emotions.

Mandy Naglich: Those signals from our nose are going to that front part of our brain where our memory is held, especially our long term memory and a lot of our emotions are formed.

James Harper: So let's say, for example, you're with a good friend, you're in a cafe, you are feeling relaxed, happy, and then you're served this very floral cup where the beans are from Ethiopia. Taste it, sit, and synthesize.

Mandy Naglich: What's around me, what's in this glass…

James Harper: And connect your relaxed, happy feelings to those unique floral flavors in the cup. What you have now done is created a reference point, an index card.

Mandy Naglich: You have this joyful emotion. You have this delicious coffee. You're kind of cementing this memory altogether with your emotion of joy and the memory of this coffee and just kind of creating that sensory memory that you can then use almost like a library, right?

James Harper: And so later on, when you have to think about what is a floral coffee? Well, you think back to that memory with your friend in the cafe, that emotion you felt, and whoosh, there's the smell. So that's tip number two, sit and synthesize and connect to how you're feeling. And now, the third and final tip. Expose yourself to as many different flavors as possible.

One way you could do it is to splash out on a 250 aroma kit where you have all these little aromas and little vials and you test yourself and I mean, that's a pricey way to do it. Or you could just live your normal life, but just do it a little bit differently. Next time you're in the kitchen cooking up a meal, taste all those individual ingredients by themselves.

Mandy Naglich: I think tasting individual ingredients is really important when you're making dinner. You know, you make a recipe, you have all these ingredients, but you never really taste the ingredients individually. For example, even just butter, tasting the difference between a cultured butter and a kind of more commodity butter; the flavor is incredibly different. Commodity butter is so waxy and just kind of there to be fat and cultured butter has this fermented almost like tang to it and when you taste butter alone, which is not that fun, but you can see how that ingredient can bring something different to the flavor of your final dish that you might not be able to put your finger on, "Oh, I used my nice butter in the sauce and that's why it has this really nice complex tang to it."

James Harper: So that's the third and final tip that I've been following myself. I taste all my ingredients individually before I cook them and cooking dinner has now been turned into this surprising, fun sensory journey. Actually helps me train my internal flavor prediction models. So now when I pick up a coffee I'm not like, "Oh, um, yeah, it smells kind of fruity, I think." I'm more like, "Yeah, I think I'm getting a note of melon here. Perhaps a bit of honey sweetness." To recap, when we drink a delicious filter coffee, black, no sugar, no milk, it can taste sweet, and it's not because of the sugars in the drink. It might be because of our mouths' sweet receptors.

And if you want to be a better coffee taster, remember, rinse your mouth out with water between coffee tastings, try to keep your mucus moist and because coffee's aromas are incomplete puzzle pieces, you can train yourself to have better flavor prediction models. So for example, after you've taken a sip of coffee, breathe out, then sit and reflect on those flavors, build a memory around it and connect to how you're feeling. And as you're preparing dinner, taste your ingredients before you cook them. Taste fruit while you're preparing a fruit salad. We are exposed to so much diversity of flavors and aromas – take every opportunity to focus on them. This flavor journey got me thinking about a pretty metaphysical question, when I taste a coffee and I get certain flavor notes, is what I'm tasting the same as what you're tasting? Do we live in the same flavor reality? And I began to wonder about this, because, for example, I gave the same coffee to different people at the Marco Beverages stand in Athens, and as they described to me what it tasted like, all their descriptions were so different.

Bram De Hoog: It's sweet.

Callum Gilmour: This is quite chemically.

Emmanuel Dias: There is a bit of orange taste, orange peel.

Miroslav Ocenas: Maybe something green in.

James Harper: Dark chocolate.

Abbie Manning: Almost tea-like.

Jeff Daou: Woody astringent finish.

James Harper: So, in the next episode, follow me on this journey as I try to answer the question: Do you and me actually taste the same thing?