Understanding the Coffee Flavor Wheel: How to Decode and Savor Coffee Flavor Notes at Home

According to Major Cohen, we all have different ways of knowing what “lemon” tastes like. But in the coffee world, there’s an art to figuring out exactly how to describe it. 

Cohen is a coffee expert and adviser at Cumulus and one of the masterminds behind the company’s signature cold brew and espresso blends. He got his start in coffee at Starbucks working as a barista before he moved into coffee education, teaching baristas how to identify different flavor characteristics in coffee, commonly called “notes,” so they’re able to recreate the magic. 

The industry tool for describing these different flavor profiles or coffee tasting notes is the Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel – a color-coded guide that provides easy insight into the many potential flavors of coffee, including Cumulus’ own cold brew blends. In a nutshell, the coffee flavor wheel allows you to start at the core of whatever is on the tip of your tongue (and your nose), before narrowing it down to even more specific flavor notes in coffee. 

“If you say ‘lemon’ to a room with one hundred people, everyone is imagining a different lemon experience in their pallet,” Cohen says. “What the flavor wheel allows you to do is connect what you’ve just tasted with things you remember about other foods.”

What Is the Coffee Flavor Wheel? How to Identify Coffee Tasting Notes at Home

Similar to the feelings or emotion wheel, a therapy tool that maps out core feelings like “happy” or “angry” as a starting point to help people to identify their emotions, you navigate the coffee notes chart or flavor wheel by starting with broad flavor descriptions in the center – notes like “sweet,” “fruity,” “roasted” and “nutty.” Beyond each bigger note on the wheel, there are smaller descriptions. The farther out you move on the wheel, the more specific the flavor experience becomes.

For example, a coffee you first identify as “nutty” could more precisely be described as “hazelnut.” A “fruity” coffee could really have notes of pomegranate or coconut once you tune into your senses. 

Similar to how feeling the emotion “happy” may actually feel most accurate to you described as something farther out on the wheel like “content,” “valued” or “free,” what starts as a general coffee note can lead you to a more descriptive experience of enjoying coffee.

For people who wish to recreate specific coffee tasting notes (or espresso tasting notes, for those who prefer the Cumulus cold espresso setting), what’s mapped on the coffee flavor wheel is based on the World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon –  the coffee industry’s standardized index for recreating blends and flavors. But you don’t need to be a barista or specialty coffee flavor wheel expert to learn the art of tasting coffee at home. 

You only need a quiet moment and a solid cup of coffee – like one brewed at home with the Cumulus cold brew machine.  

The Cumulus Approach: Cold Brew Flavor Profiles and Choosing a Capsule Based on Flavor Notes 

All of Cumulus’ capsule blends for at-home cold brew and espresso draw directly from the flavor wheel, so it’s no accident that the colors decorating each capsule correspond to the notes that create each coffee capsule flavor.

For example, if you’re drinking a Ritual blend, you’re really savoring its nutty undertones. Choose a Lucid cold brew and you’ll hover around crisper, juicier notes. The bottom brown hue of each capsule represents the roast type – light, medium or dark. 

Importantly, each Cumulus blend retains their flavor notes as a highly sophisticated cold brew flavor profile, even as they’re poured chilled directly into your cup.

Whatever notes you pick up in your morning cup of coffee, exploring the Flavor Wheel is one way to help you keep in touch with your senses and the world around you. For Cohen, the feeling he derives from his morning cup of coffee comes from the connection he feels to all the people who touched the coffee before it reached his cup.

“There’s an incredible sense of humanity about coffee,” Cohen said. “That’s an exploration that I enjoy every day.”