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1 The Sensory Professional

The Sensory Professional

In tens of thousands of Starbucks® stores around the world, baristas

use their sensory skills every day to ensure the quality of the brewed
coffee served and the shots of espresso pulled throughout their shifts.
And when they are not utilizing these skills, they are talking about the
senses—guiding customers on their own sensory explorations as they
help them find their perfect coffee.

Sensory skills are important in many areas of the coffee industry.

Coffee cuppers, professional coffee tasters, use a quick, efficient slurp
to aspirate coffee across the palate, spraying the coffee over taste
receptors in all parts of the mouth. Cupping helps these coffee experts
qualify specific aspects of a coffee’s texture, flavor, acidity and
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 sweetness. Professional cuppers can not only identify what the flavor
or aroma is, but also the intensity. Through practice, cuppers learn how
to communicate with each other through the common language of
coffee.

Here are some of the Starbucks partners who use finely honed tasting
skills daily throughout the industry:

Our coffee buyers use their palates to find new and interesting
flavors in coffee as they cup offer and preshipment samples in
origin countries or at the Starbucks Coffee Trading Company
(SCTC) in Lausanne, Switzerland
Our Global Coffee Quality team employs sensory skills in the
approval process of every sample of newly arrived green beans
before a lot can be released for roasting or blending
Our Global Coffee Development team cups to determine flavor
notes and to decide and develop the full flavor expression of a
coffee, including blending recipes and roasting profiles
Our master roasters make great use of their sensory skills to
ensure coffee quality and flavor development during roasting
Our Research and Development team uses sensory skills to
validate cup profiles to Starbucks standards and to develop new
Starbucks® beverages and food platforms that show up in our
stores every day around the globe
Tasting skills are not just for coffee—the sensory skills of the
partners on our Global Tea Quality team are used in assessing
the quality of tea and botanical components as they develop new
tea blends or maintain the flavor profiles of favorite offerings
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 Get Your Passports Ready

One of our favorite tools to help you engage in sensory excursions into
the coffee world is the Starbucks® Coffee Passport. This nifty little
book may be in the pocket of your apron right now. Your Coffee
Passport is part guide and part journal. As you have seen, there are
plenty of pages inside for making notes every time you taste or revisit a
coffee. You filled out a Coffee Passport when you first began with
Starbucks; you tasted your way through our coffees and wrote down
your impressions. But you are not done yet. Think of it as a way to
continue to document your sensory journeys.

It’s no mistake that this tool is called a passport. Coffees gather an

immeasurable amount of their flavor from where they are grown. Each
time you taste a coffee, you visit different places of origin and learn
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 about the geography, culture, people and places associated with that
coffee. Your Coffee Passport also lets you travel back in time. As you
flip through the pages of previous passports, you relive past
experiences and celebrate anew all the coffees you have encountered
as a barista. It’s all there in handy, pocket-size records: who you were
then as a coffee lover, who you are now and where you are headed.

Your Coffee Passport is just that—all yours. It’s the place to capture
your personal impressions of coffee. Find ways of tasting that work for
you; make the pages your own. Engage with your passport, describing
your experience with each coffee, detailing your sensory perceptions.
Compare and contrast coffees with other favorites, sketch a map of the
origin country, record the brew method and the name of the barista
who did the brewing, tape in a lovely Starbucks Reserve® card, or give
yourself suggestions about complementary flavors and food pairings.
There’s no right or wrong approach—as long as you are recording your
experiences tasting coffees.

So get your papers in order. You have some big trips coming up!
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