What is your coffee Taste DNA?

Most people know bits and pieces about their own coffee taste. You might know you prefer lighter roasts, or that you steer clear of anything too sharp. Maybe you always notice the chocolatey ones. Maybe you keep buying Ethiopian coffees without ever really asking yourself why.

The trouble is that those preferences tend to live as vague feelings. You remember individual coffees. You don't see what connects them.

That's the gap Taste DNA is built to close.

One rating tells you almost nothing

Rate one coffee five stars and all you've told us is that you liked that coffee. Useful, but that's about as far as it goes.

Five is where it unlocks. That's the point where there's enough to build a profile from, and it keeps sharpening every time you rate something. Your highest scoring coffees might consistently have more acidity than you'd have guessed. You might turn out to prefer washed coffees over naturals. The same couple of origins might keep appearing at the top.

Or, and this is the uncomfortable one, the coffees you think you like might not be the ones you actually score highest.

The individual rating matters a lot less than the pattern behind it.

Two questions, not one

When you rate a coffee you're answering two things rather than one. The stars say how good it was, and that's the public score everyone sees. Separately, and privately, you tell us whether it was your sort of thing.

They sound like the same question. They really aren't. You can give a coffee four stars, mean it, and still know full well it isn't for you.

The stars go to the community score. That second answer decides how much the coffee shapes your Taste DNA.

Taste DNA is built from behaviour, not a quiz

One thing I didn't want BeanScore to become was another preference questionnaire. You know the type. Do you like fruity coffee? Chocolate or citrus? Light roast or dark?

There's nothing really wrong with that approach, except that it leans entirely on you already knowing your own taste. Most people don't, not in any detail that's actually useful.

Taste DNA works the other way round. Rather than asking what you think you like, it looks at what you actually rate. Your behaviour does the talking, which matters, because what we say we like and what we keep going back to aren't always the same thing.

I noticed this in my own ratings

One of the first patterns I spotted while building BeanScore was how often I was rating Ethiopian coffees highly.

Sounds obvious now. But I hadn't consciously clocked it before. I wasn't walking into shops thinking "I am an Ethiopian coffee person". I was just buying coffee.

Laid out together though, the pattern was sat right there.

That was the point where BeanScore stopped feeling like a coffee tracker to me and started feeling like something more useful. The history wasn't just helping me remember what I'd drunk. It was telling me something about myself.

What Taste DNA actually looks at

It's built from your ratings and from what we know about the coffees you rated. So:

• how much acidity, sweetness and body you go for
• the flavour notes that keep showing up in your best scores
• which origins you rate highest, with blends counting for less than single origins
• roast level
• how you brew, both your most used method and the one you score best with
• how broad your flavour range is

No single one of those defines your taste. The value is in how they combine.

Someone might love Ethiopian coffees, but only washed ones. Someone else might rate fruit-forward coffees highly, but only when the acidity is kept in check. Another person scores fuller-bodied coffees higher no matter where they're from.

Taste is rarely one-dimensional, so the profile shouldn't be either.

There's no mystery box in here, by the way. Taste DNA is worked out from your own ratings and the coffee's own details. No outside model is being asked what it reckons about you.

What you skip counts too

Not everything you tell us is a rating.

If you keep swiping past dark roasts, or the same flavour note keeps appearing in coffees you pass on, that gets noticed and those coffees stop being pushed at you quite so hard. It's a softer signal than a rating, and it should be, but it's there.

It should change as you do

Taste DNA isn't meant to label you for good.

Your taste moves. You try things you'd have avoided a year ago, your brewing gets better, you buy different kit, you get comfortable with flavours that used to put you off. You might spend six months on bright floral coffees and then find yourself wanting something richer.

That's fine, and your profile should move with you. It compares your early ratings against your recent ones, so a shift in what you're scoring highly shows up as a shift rather than being averaged away into the pile.

It's a living profile, not a personality test.

The bit that actually matters

A good looking radar chart is nice. It isn't the point.

The point is what happens once BeanScore understands your taste. Your history starts shaping what you get shown next, so instead of discovery resting on popularity and average scores alone, there's another question in the mix.

Does this coffee look like something you would enjoy?

How much weight that question carries depends on how much you've rated. Early on, when there isn't much to go on, more of the decision comes from how a coffee is generally rated and whether it suits how you brew. As your profile firms up, your own taste takes over as the biggest factor.

It won't always be right. Taste is far too messy for that. But your own history becomes part of the recommendation, which beats pretending every coffee drinker wants the same thing.

Your past coffee should help find your next one

That's the whole principle behind Taste DNA. The coffees you've already drunk shouldn't just sit in a list going stale.

They should keep earning their place. Helping you understand what you like, showing you patterns you'd never have spotted on your own, and making the next bag an easier decision than the last one.

Your past coffee should help find your next one. That's what Taste DNA is for.