Found notes of Savory in coffee?🥩

It happens more than one might reflexively think. What follows is largely sense experience findings and not from peer reviewed food science journals.

Underdeveloped coffee often tastes legume-like. It’s legume-like with a hint of earth. This might be why coffee has historically been thought of as a bean versus a seed. Therefore, coffee is actually a roasted plant and fruit. So savory is sometimes an accidental inherency, but often times intentional (some fruit are actually savory -jack fruit, egg plant, cucumber, tomatoes, olives and Mustard lamb).

The next question is, is the unexpected always to be avoided/feared? So is finding savory, inherently bad. We would argue, it has to be the right kind of savory. I currently tried a lovely anaerobic natural El Paraiso with notes of mixed stone fruit ,blueberry cheesecake and white Miso.It’s f-ing delicious, medium-high sweetness and acidity with improving drinking experience as it cools. However, it initially incongruent as a tasting concept, not as a flavor but symphony in the cup. 

In addition, sometimes the extraction method can highlight savory over another brewing method that might mute it. A good example of this is extracting coffees as espresso. An under extraction usually hits us as briny and mineral-like.

A further example of savory in coffee are some recent lots from Colombia. Because of a particularly bad leaf rust year in 2012 there was a big initiative to replant and replace cultivars more vulnerable to leaf rust with those less susceptible. So harvests that were largely typicia and bourbon are now largely composed of caturra, caturi. It has increased the savory in the these coffees coming from Colombia(sometimes producing strong stew aromatics and mustard-like).

All of this is to say, savory in coffee is not inherently evil. There are no right or wrong flavor to coffee,just whatever your taste buds desire.