Look at the coffee we sell and you’ll find descriptions like toasted marshmallow, ginger snap cookie, chestnut, and dried fruit. A fair question we hear is whether we add those flavors to the coffee. The answer is no, and the reason why is interesting.
Nothing Is Added. Ever.
Our coffee is only coffee. No syrups, no oils, no flavoring sprayed on after the roast. When we say a coffee has cocoa and savory notes, we mean those flavors are already in the bean and the roast brings them forward.
Coffee is a fruit seed, and like wine grapes it carries the fingerprint of where it grew. Altitude, soil, rainfall, the variety of the plant, and how the fruit was processed after picking all leave a mark. A washed Ethiopian coffee grown at high altitude really does taste floral and fruity. A Brazilian coffee grown lower and roasted dark really does taste like chocolate and nuts. Nobody put it there.
Why You Might Not Taste What We Listed
This trips people up, so let’s be direct about it. Tasting notes aren’t a promise that every drinker will taste those exact things. They’re the flavors that come through most clearly. Professional tasters, who do this every day and have trained their palates for years, will pick out far more complexity than a typical coffee drinker, and that’s completely normal.
A few other things get in the way. Adding cream and sugar covers up subtle notes. Drinking coffee scalding hot mutes flavor, since your tongue picks up much more as the cup cools. Notes also fade with time after roasting, and much faster once the coffee is ground. Coffee that’s been sitting for four months has lost many of its distinct notes, no matter what the bag says.
How to Start Tasting More
You don’t need any equipment or training for this. Try it once and you’ll be surprised.
- Black makes the notes easiest to pick out, so it’s worth trying the first few sips that way. If you always take cream or sugar, that’s fine too. Just keep it the same from cup to cup, so you’re comparing the coffee and not the additions.
- Smell it before you drink it. A large part of what we call taste is actually smell.
- Let it cool for a few minutes. Most people find the flavors open up considerably as the temperature drops.
- Ask yourself broad questions first. Is it sweet or savory? Bright or heavy? Does it remind you of fruit, nuts, chocolate, or spice? Specific words come later.
- Try two different coffees side by side. Differences are far easier to notice than absolutes.
A Side-by-Side Worth Trying This Fall
If you want a clear contrast, brew our Mexico Chiapas Light Roast, which leans bright, fruity, and clove-like, next to our Brazil Cerrado Dark Roast, which is smooth and bold with chocolate nut undertones. Same brewer, same grind, same water. The difference will be obvious, and once you’ve tasted that difference it gets much easier to notice smaller ones.
For something in the middle, our Costa Rica Medium-Dark Roast carries spice and toasted marshmallow notes with a mild acidity, and it also happens to make a nice espresso.
The Roast Level Matters as Much as the Origin
The same bean roasted light and roasted dark will taste like two different coffees. Lighter roasts preserve more of the origin character, so you get more of the fruit and floral side. Darker roasts push the roast itself forward, giving you those toasty, chocolatey, sometimes smoky notes. If you want to go deeper on that, we wrote a full guide to choosing between light, medium, and dark roast.
One last thing worth repeating: tasting notes only survive in coffee that’s actually fresh. Everything we roast goes out the door within a few days of roasting, which is the whole reason those notes are still there when the bag reaches you.
Browse our coffee selection and see what you can pick out. The shop page has a Tasting Notes filter, so you can pull up every coffee with the notes you like.