What Gets Lost Between the Cup and the Reorder
You brewed a Burundi natural process through the Chemex two weeks ago and it was one of the better cups you have had in a year. Jammy, low acidity, body like warm stone fruit syrup. You remember it clearly. You do not remember the roaster, the lot name, the roast date on the bag, or whether you got it from a subscription or a one-off purchase. The bag is in the recycling.
This is the experience that a tasting log exists to capture. Not retrospectively — at the time, from the cup, while the aroma is still in the air.
The Roast Date Gap That Changes Everything
The Roast Date and Brew Date fields together are the most practically useful piece of data in the record, and they are the fields that casual tasters consistently skip. Coffee is a dated food product. An Ethiopian Yirgacheffe from a top-tier roaster at 11 days off roast is a materially different cup from the same coffee at 28 days. The CO2 outgassing peak that gives a properly rested filter coffee its bloom and aromatic complexity is measurable and time-dependent. If you are logging tasting notes without the roast date, you cannot reconstruct whether a flat, hollow cup was a function of the origin, the roast profile, or the simple fact that you brewed it 45 days past the roast date.
The Brew Method field adds the other half of the extraction context. An Indonesian Sumatra at 18:1 ratio in a French press and the same coffee in a V60 at 15:1 are not the same beverage. The earthiness and low-acid body profile of a wet-hulled Sumatran reads completely differently through a metal filter versus a paper one. Without the brew method, the tasting notes are floating: you cannot diagnose why a future cup of the same origin tastes different.
Dry Aroma, Wet Aroma, and the Moment the Water Hits
Dry Aroma — the ground coffee before any liquid is introduced — and Wet Aroma — the bloom or the first pour — are two distinct sensory moments. A coffee that is aggressively aromatic dry can be surprisingly subdued in the cup, and vice versa. The dry aroma of a washed Kenyan AA will often read of black currant and tomato leaf at 10-14 days off roast. When the hot water hits, the wet aroma shifts into something brighter — floral and citrus — before the cup settles. These are observations worth separating.
The Tasting Notes field is free-text because the SCA flavour wheel is a reference, not a constraint. The notes that are actually useful are the ones that capture the progression of the cup: what it tastes like at first sip while still hot, what emerges at mid-temperature, what the finish is doing as the cup cools. A Kenya that opens with bergamot and grapefruit zest and finishes with a lingering brown sugar sweetness is described differently than one that peaks hot and turns astringent as it cools.
Acidity and Body as Navigational Tools
Acidity and Body on a 1-10 scale give you the two axes that most define a coffee's character. High acidity, low body: washed Ethiopian or Kenyan. Low acidity, high body: Sumatran or Robusta-blend espresso. High acidity, high body: certain Colombian and Rwandan naturals. After 50 entries, the database tells you where your palate consistently lands: whether you always score Origin: Guatemala higher than Origin: Vietnam, whether natural-process coffees cluster above 7 on body, whether your preference for Brew Method: Aeropress correlates with higher overall acidity scores because you run shorter steep times.
The origin list covers 54 countries. It is comprehensive because coffee's terroir is as specific as wine's. A Yemeni Mocca is not interchangeable with a Harar natural process. Both are distinct from a Peruvian high-altitude washed. The origin field is the first filter.