Danes Specialty Coffee Director Paul Jackson explores why enhancing the sense of smell leads to improved coffee appreciation skills.
This article was published in Beanscene magazine in July 2015.
We may use our mouths to drink coffee, but it’s our nose that does most of the work when it comes to tasting it. While our taste buds can detect the flavours of sweet, sour, bitter, and salty, anything beyond this is detected by our olfactory receptors.
To make great coffee you need to be able to taste great coffee. An integral part of developing a sophisticated palate is through fine-tuning your sense of smell. This is how Le Nez du Café came about. Le Nez du Café is an aroma kit of the most relevant scents in coffee. Its aim is to help others learn to smell coffee, in order to taste it better.
How does our sense of smell work?
When molecules are released by substances around us they stimulate special nerve cells in our nose, mouth, or throat. Odours stimulate olfactory cells, which are found in a tiny patch of tissue high up in the nose, and connect directly to the brain.
People have about 450 different types of olfactory receptors. They are critical to our appreciation of the foods and beverages we consume – think of how foods seem lacklustre when we have a head cold.
In 2014 researcher Andreas Keller and his colleagues from the Rockefeller’s Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behaviour found that humans can detect more than one trillion olfactory stimuli, far more than previous smell studies had estimated.
A system for smells
Acknowledging the important contribution of smell to taste, French wine expert Jean Lenoir created Le Nez du Café. Based on the same principle of Le Nez du Vin, the wine aroma kit Jean created more than 30 years ago, Jean put together a collection of the 36 most typical aromas found in the world’s top coffees. The vial aroma kit forms the basis of a Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) course that is used to calibrate and benchmark everyone to certain scents found in coffee.
Central to Le Nez du Café is that it creates a mode of identifying and remembering aromas. It not only isolates specific aromas of coffee, but it names them so that you can improve your aroma memory. You can also connect a given aroma with familiar aromas, and use common language when discussing it with others.
Scent categories
The 36 aromas in the Le Nez du Café kit are grouped into different categories, according to the reactions that produce each type of scent.
Such categories include enzymatic scents, which are the result of enzymatic reactions within the coffee bean. Quite pleasant, they are characterised by gentle, floral, or citric aromas. They are commonly found in the dry fragrance of freshly ground coffee.
