Flavors and notes

Roasters describe their coffee in their own words. The flavor wheel is a fixed vocabulary. This page is about how we get from one to the other.

The wheel

Bloom is built on the Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel published by the Specialty Coffee Association in 2016. It organises how coffee tastes into three rings: nine broad families at the centre, more specific groups around them, and individual descriptors on the outside.

We didn't invent this language and we don't extend it. The colours on the wheel, and the dot beside every matched tasting note, are taken straight from the SCA's poster — and the rest of Bloom stays deliberately grey so that they're the only thing competing for your attention.

From a roaster's words to the wheel

A roaster writes whatever they taste — "Mandarin orange", "milk chocolate", "overripe raspberry". None of that is guaranteed to be a word on the wheel. So for every coffee we take each tasting note and look for the wheel's equivalent.

Most notes land exactly. The interesting cases are the two below.

Approximate matches

Sometimes a roaster's word isn't on the wheel but plainly means something that is — a spelling variant, a near-synonym, a term borrowed from another tasting vocabulary. When we're confident enough, we match it anyway and mark it, so you can see the wheel's word is our reading rather than the roaster's. Approximate matches carry a tilde and a dashed underline:

The first matched exactly. The second is our reading. On the wheel, a match we're less sure of lights its arc more faintly than a certain one, so you can see at a glance how much to trust it.

Notes that don't match

Plenty of good tasting notes aren't on the wheel at all — "elegant acidity", "silky", "juicy". These get a grey dot and light nothing up:

We show them anyway. They're what the roaster chose to say about their own coffee, and hiding a note just because our vocabulary is narrower than theirs would be the wrong trade.

How results are ordered

When you pick a flavor, the exact answers come first: coffees whose own notes resolve to precisely the flavor you clicked. Everything under the Similar divider is related rather than exact.

"Related" covers two things. A coffee may sit above or below your flavor on the same branch — you clicked Berry and it tastes of blueberry, or the reverse. Or it may share a parent with yours: you clicked Blueberry, and this one tastes of strawberry. Both are worth showing, and neither is the thing you asked for.