The Color of Coffee: How We Taste, Talk About, and Experience It

Coffee is notoriously hard to describe.

It starts piping hot and can cool by more than 100 degrees in half an hour. As it cools, the chemistry in the cup changes, and so do the flavors, appearing and disappearing in real time. Unlike beer, wine, or spirits, coffee gives you almost no visual cues to work from. And yet there are more flavor compounds in a single cup than in the most complex Burgundy.

So how do you talk about something that complicated? For most of the specialty industry, the answer has been numbers. We took a different route. We use crayons.

Why numbers fall short

Specialty coffee is traditionally evaluated by scoring multiple categories (flavor, aroma, mouthfeel, body, balance, finish) and rolling them up into a single number. An 83. A 91. A 75.

The problem is that numbers don't have much in common with sensory experience. What does an 83 actually mean? How is it meaningfully different from a 75? Could you, sitting at a table with both cups in front of you, tell? Probably not. And even if you could, the number wouldn't tell you anything about what was in the cup. It wouldn't help you choose between two coffees you've never tried. It wouldn't help you figure out what you like.

Several years ago, we decided that wasn't good enough.

A more natural language for flavor

Instead of a numerical scale, we leaned into something more instinctive: the way most of us first learned to recognize flavor as kids.

Through color.

• Chocolatey notes are brown.
• Blueberry is blue.
• Lemony is yellow.
• Citrusy is orange.
• A flash of strawberry might pull a red.
• Floral, perfumed notes might suggest pink.

You already know how to do this. Everyone does. It's the language of childhood, before anyone told us flavor was supposed to be complicated.

The crayon approach

In our cafés and at our headquarters, we hand people a small pack of crayons and a sheet with three empty circles. The instruction is simple.

Color what you taste.

What happens next is always interesting. Brown and black get plenty of use, especially at the start. Then a hint of red sneaks in. Someone reaches for pink. The circles fill up differently for every person at the table, and somehow they all manage to feel right.

This exercise has become the clearest expression of our approach to coffee tasting: serious, but not snobby. Curious, but never gatekept.

Why it works

The crayon approach is doing a few things at once.

It removes intimidation. Nobody has to know what "molasses-forward with stone fruit acidity and a chocolate finish" is supposed to mean. They just have to pick up a crayon.

It builds immediate confidence. People who don't usually taste or compare coffees walk away from the exercise with a vocabulary that's actually theirs. They tasted it. They drew it. The result is on the page.

It welcomes everyone to the table. Specialty coffee can feel like a club with a secret handshake. We'd rather it feel like a kitchen with the lights on.

And there's a reason it lands so naturally: Coffee is a tropical fruit! Many of the colors in a basic eight-pack of crayons point straight toward tropical flavors. The vocabulary is already in your hand.

Coffee, color, and Brooklyn

There's a reason this approach feels at home with us specifically.

We celebrate two things in equal measure: the bold, colorful character of Brooklyn, and the colorful characters of the coffees we source and roast. Our logo is built to reflect that. The outline (which traces the borough of Brooklyn itself) never changes. The colors inside are always evolving.

Just like our coffees. Just like our customers. Just like our coworkers.

The logo is a small, daily reminder of the philosophy: a fixed shape, an ever-shifting palette inside.

A different way to taste

Walk into our HQ and you'll see our cupping tables, which we affectionately call the Super Bowl hula-hoop cupping tables. They're round, plumbed for hot water, and built from repurposed hand-washing sinks originally installed for workers during World War II. There's nothing sleek or laboratory-grade about them, and that's the point.

They're designed to remind us that coffee tasting can be playful and imaginative. They invite you to peer into a cup and imagine its tropical roots, the lush green landscapes, the bright red and yellow cherries on glossy leaves, the butterflies, birds, and flowers in the places this fruit actually grows. Coffee comes from some of the most colorful places on earth. The cup should remind you of that.

The takeaway

The Color of Coffee is, at its core, a reminder that:

• Flavor is not a math problem.
• There is no single right answer.
• Every person brings a unique palate to the table.

Flavor and aroma, like beauty, live in the eyes, the nose, and the mouth of the beholder.

So next time you're sitting with a cup, don't reach for a score. Reach for a color. Tell us what you taste. We'll be doing the same thing on our end of the bar.

Want to try it? Check out our private tours and tasting signup! We host them regularly, crayons included. Or order a bag of beans and run the exercise at your kitchen table. Tag us @brooklynroasting when you do. We love seeing what colors you taste!