4 Parts of the Tongue
1) The Front is where you taste sweetness. These flavors include things like sugar and milk chocolate.
2) Just back from sweet we have salty. A lot of times I will notice that sweet will bleed into salty. Flavors would include a blandness, sharpness or softness. I will often experience a dry acidity that will captivate the sour and salty parts of my tongue.
3) Just back from salty is sour. These flavors include winey or sour characteristics. I will often get a fruity or tart flavor in this area of my tongue.
4) In the very back is bitter. This is where finish will often come into play. How long does that bitter flavor linger? Which characteristics or flavors linger in you mouth and from which part and for how long?
Body
Body is primarily how the coffee feels on your tongue. A good way to gauge this is drinking some non-fat (light body) and whole milk (heavy body). Notice the weight of the different milks on your tongue. Now when you drink coffee do the same thing. This is essentially the body of the coffee.
Remember
Next time you do a coffee tasting notice where it hits on your tongue and try to describe what you taste out loud with a description.
Have any questions? Post in the comments.
Related Posts: Part 1 – How To Do a Coffee Taste | Part 3 – Four Coffee Terms | Recent Coffee Taste
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Do you think you could talk a bit about how much geography affects acidity (and taste)? Is it more to do with altitude than other factors?
sour, salt, sweet, bitter?
Salt sweet sour and bitter
sweet salty sour bitter
I recently read about this on a number of sites. It seems the tongue “taste map” was debunked as early as 1974 and “was essentially a century-old misunderstanding that no one challenged”
http://www.livescience.com/health/060829_bad_tongue.html
I just started hearing about this a few weeks back. Though from my personal experience it holds true on the tongue. I think maybe the majority of those tastes reside in those centers while you can decipher those tastes on other parts of your tongue but w/ less intensity. This is not a scientific rebuttal just what I have noticed for myself. Thanks for sharing very interesting.
FYI – Some of your links are broken. For instance, in this page you link to http://coffeecupnews.org/index.php/2008/12/tutorial-4-4-terms-in-tasting-coffee-how-to-do-a-coffee-tasting-part-3/, which should be coffeecupnews.org/tutorial-4-4-terms-in-tasting-coffee-how-to-do-a-coffee-tasting-part-3/. This is true on other pages as well. Nice articles, by the way.