The Project Mission

What we call “flavor” is a complex interplay of smell, taste, context and experience. It’s more than just chemistry. Communicating flavor involves transforming visceral experience into language. It’s hard.

We can be trained to pick out the specifics, but that’s often at odds with the intent of the craft:

Coffee is meant to be enjoyed.

The Coffee Flavor Project aims to describe anyone’s experience with the flavor of coffee, regardless of sensitivity or training.

Empirical Models of Flavor

There are many scientific approaches to flavor. Some try to catalogue the chemicals present. Others involve trained experts with highly developed palates. Other approaches branch out from these ideas. By comparison, our approach is simple:

Ask people about their experience.

Surveys are imperfect, but stand to complement other approaches. They also allow us to explore the effect of expertise on the experience of flavor. On a more technical note, our approach parallels the “flavor tree” ideas. The five basic taste receptors - of which pH play a primary role for coffee - ground the basic human experience as a sort of directed graph, with details branching out as more sensory information - and experience - are included. Assuming the chemical composition of the coffee is the same, the graph should be effectively the same, and the individual human’s experience corresponds to a horizontal slice of that tree.

At least, that’s the hypothesis that we’re looking to test, with some mathematical and statistical support from our friends at the Pasayten Institute.

Want to get in involved?

Who doesn't want to taste coffee? We’ll be around the valley, pouring free coffee and giving a way samples in exchange for a survey. We’re also working to set up tasting events. Sign up for our newsletter to stay informed of what’s happening!