The Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) announced that for the first time in 21 years, the Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel has been updated.
To design the new flavor wheel the SCAA partnered with the Food Science and Technology Department at the University of California, Davis. “The research conducted at UC Davis included over 70 professional coffee tasters and sensory panelists who participated in an Agglomerative Hierarchical Cluster (AHC) analysis, a web-based graphical sorting exercise never before used in coffee research, which was performed to group the flavor attributes into different categories,” the SCAA wrote on its Website. An analysis was performed to visualize where flavor attributes fell in proximity to one another.
The SCAA will have posters of the new Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel available in early February at scaa.org/store.
