Acidity... it's not the devil

Posted: 9/10/2009 12:57:07 p.m.

Acidity is a commonly used word when describing the taste characteristics of quality coffee, unfortunately it seems that acidity is often interpreted as a negative feature, mainly due to the fact that many assume that acidity means sourness. This has resulted in many roasters steering clear of the word acidity in their descriptions, therefore substituting with words such as "brightness" and "high notes".

However lets get things clear, acidity is extremely important in coffee and will often transform an average coffee into something special. Recently I attended the Cup of Excellence Workshop in Wellington, now if this means nothing to you please go to Emma's Blog (Atomic Coffee Roasters), Emma has outlined the program in her blog and she was right on the button when she called the Wellington event "a coffee roasters dream". The workshop not only touched on the program itself but also covered in detail how the coffees are evaluated and scored by the Cup of Excellence jury.

The evaluation takes many categories into account when scoring but probably two critical categories stand out in terms of attaining high scores and they are ACIDITY and SWEETNESS. Acidity and sweetness work together to accentuate highly desireable flavour characteristics, the marriage of these components allows coffee to produce flavours such as (but certainly not limited to) ripe stonefruit, honey, butterscotch, lavender, blueberry and blackcurrant. Low acidity coffee, although often having good sweetness will taste flat, dull and bland, often these coffees are used in an espresso blend to soften the flavour or to restrain the exciting characteristics of the high acidity coffee.

Unbalanced acditity (high acidity with low sweetness) can certainly result in a bad experience, however work high acidity with unique flavours good sweetness and a syrupy texture and we can have something unbelieveable.