When it's time to release a new coffee, the same scene plays out in every roastery I've worked in. We'd brew a test batch or taste on the cupping table, and someone asks the question: what should go on the bag?
"I guess it tastes like chocolate. Starfruit? Maybe cherry. Lychee... yeah, lychee."
"I think it's more like cantaloupe."
"I'm getting a lot of Meyer lemon."
If multiple trained palates can't agree on what we're tasting, and the team has to argue and stretch to settle on two to four descriptors for a bag, we're probably not communicating clearly to the person who has to decide whether to buy it. So we changed how we describe coffee at Pastime. We're focused on notes that communicate a tactile experience alongside flavor, instead of chasing increasingly specific flavor associations.
Where Tasting Notes Came From
Coffee tasting notes started as a professional tool, not a consumer one. The Specialty Coffee Association published the first Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel in 1995, and the 2016 update (built on World Coffee Research's Sensory Lexicon) expanded it to 110 attributes. The wheel was designed to help graders, buyers, and roasters talk to each other. It was never really meant to get copied straight onto retail bags.
In November 2024, the SCA finalized a new system called the Coffee Value Assessment, which separates descriptive sensory notes (what's actually in the cup) from affective assessment (what the taster preferred). The CVA treats mouthfeel as its own category alongside flavor, and uses a Check-All-That-Apply approach instead of forcing a taster to land on one specific descriptor. We'd already been finding our way toward something like this on our own cupping table. Flavor associations alone don't accurately communicate how we experience our coffee.
Why Flavor Notes Often Miss
Associative flavor notes can work on their own when the flavor is genuinely there. Sometimes a coffee really is overwhelmingly peach, chocolate, cantaloupe, or fresh blueberry, and when that happens, those notes belong on the bag. More often, tasting notes signal quality and roasting style rather than describe what's actually in the cup. Take a lightly roasted single origin. Roasters tend to label these with specific fruit notes to help them stand out on the shelf, but in many genuinely high quality light roasts, the fruit is subtle, and you have to hunt for it. Print "grapefruit, jasmine, honey" on a bag when the coffee mostly reads as clean and citrusy, and you've set the customer up to feel like they missed something.
The other failure mode is the stretch. The roast is fine, but the team can't find anything dominant, so someone proposes "gooseberry" because the coffee has some punchy acidity, and "brown sugar" because it has some caramelized sweetness. Both get printed. Neither is specific enough to be useful, and neither describes what drinking the coffee actually feels like as it glides across your palate.
How We Write Tasting Notes at Pastime
When customers describe a coffee back to us, they rarely lead with fruit. They say things like smooth, heavy, earthy, bright. That's tactile language, and it's how people actually experience a cup of coffee. So we've moved toward descriptors like fruity, jammy, bright, structured, powerful, and round. Less specific than "elderflower and blueberry," but more accurate about what to expect when you brew the coffee. If a coffee is labeled fruity, it's going to be in your face fruity. If it's labeled structured, you can feel that structure as the coffee glides across your palate. The drinker can pick a bag based on how they want their morning to go, instead of playing a guessing game about whether they'll actually detect mango, root beer, or kasugai gummies.
We prioritize descriptors that communicate texture, weight, and overall character, and save specific flavor callouts for coffees where the flavor is genuinely dominant. Fruity for a coffee that reads as fruity but isn't dominantly one fruit. Jammy, round, heavy for an experimentally washed Colombia with a thick body and long finish. Clean, powerful, effervescent for a Kenya where the acidity is the main event. Floral, juicy, delicate for a washed Ethiopia with refined, tea-like structure. When a coffee really is overwhelmingly fragrant like jasmine flowers, or really does taste like mango, we still say so—specific flavors aren't going anywhere. You just won't find notes on our bags that leave you wondering if you missed something.
This isn't about abandoning the flavor wheel. We still use the SCA vocabulary internally and with customers who prefer that language, and it's how our team calibrates. The change is just in what makes it onto the bag. Keeping the wheel for in person tasting gives us room for a broader conversation, and more connection through the shared experience.
We're also not claiming tactile descriptors are objectively better for everyone. If you're deep into specialty coffee and enjoy hunting for a specific note, a detailed flavor list is part of the fun. If you've just opened a fresh bag and want to know what you're about to drink, clearer language usually communicates expectations better.
Pick up a bag and see notes like floral, silky, round? That's what the coffee is going to feel like. See nectarine, black tea, honey? Those are the things we couldn't stop noticing. Either way, we're describing the cup in front of us, not the version that sells best.