Developing your Aroma Sense for Coffee

WOLFF WEEKLY VLOGG 013 | Peter Wolff with Getting your Nose in the Know
Hello everyone. My name is Peter Wolff and today I’m going to be sharing with you some of my strategies for developing your sense of aroma appreciation of coffee. Sort of looking at the sensory aspect of or sensory appreciation of coffee, but particularly in terms of aroma.
One of the things that I’d highly recommend that you do first is go out and either download or purchase the new flavour lexicon that has just been released. It really is such an expanded and powerful thing that we can be using. There is plenty of information available on how you use it. We’re looking at starting on the inside, where it’s your primary sensation or experience, and obviously making your way out to the outer areas of the wheel where it’s really that defined experience that you’re getting.
The other thing that I think is definitely worthwhile considering is definitely looking at the Les Nu de Cafe kits, which have been around for quite a while. Or looking at the new kid on the block which is the Scentone kit and that’s the flavour map. It’s 100 different aromas that are found in coffee.
Both are adequate and both are very excellent for you to use, so you can choose whichever path that you want to go down. The main thing is that by using these particular kits, they help you to create the associations to a particular aroma. So if you’re not familiar with what a coffee blossom smells like, obviously go to the coffee blossom vial and obviously really inhale that deeply and really imprint that and create that experience in your mind. So that next time if you smell that in coffee it will trigger that association and you can go, “hey, that’s coffee blossom.”
So they’re really powerful kits to use. So it’s not a laborious task to be using it, you only really need to invest about ten minutes a day. Within about two weeks, you should be able to pretty much get about 90 per cent of what you’re smelling in terms of an evaluation process. So it only takes about two weeks, and then our recommendation would be that you’re maintaining that about every three months. So every three months you might do a two week block of staying on top of that. It keeps you really calm.
The other option that you can do, which is what I started before Les nu de Cafe came out - and I still think that it’s a very valuable process - is that we look at things like we go and buy dark chocolate, we go and buy milk chocolate, we buy almonds, we buy hazelnuts, we get citrus peel. We get all of these different common and easily accessible produce that’s available and then what we do is we use that as a reference. Having that real, fresh lime smell is very distinct. That fresh, citrus orange peel is very distinct. And then maybe looking at transitioning that into maybe an orange marmalade and seeing how that sort of changes and it becomes a more heavier aroma, a little bit more sugary, obviously not as intense and as I said more complex.
So there are different strategies that we can use. Definitely train as a team, I think, because this is very powerful within your business or organisation because then everyone is being calibrated to the same standards and to the same products. We all have a common reference point. So the more people you can involve in terms of the sensory evaluation of your business, the stronger the outcome you will have.
So they’re just a few strategies that I have in terms of developing your aroma appreciation in coffee and that strength and confidence that you need. Next time, I’m going to talk about the flavour. Okay, goodbye.

[@Sohasorouri]

I JUST learned that such a thing, called an aroma kit exists, and I find that amazing!!!
It might be a bit expensive, but imagine how much a coffee shop could improve if they actually trained their baristas with these kits.

[@troyhayder6986]

When i was sixteen...if my parents made coffee downstairs...it would stink the house out and i could smell it in my bedroom...these days..i cant smell it right under my nose...its totally odourless...