Thanks, Jason I'll try to post either briefishly, or seldomishly.

The expertise in this forum gives me pause. So many professionals in the flavor trades.

It helps enormously to taste two different espressos at a time. "This is more bitter than that," accompanied by "I prefer that one to this," and "This is Brazilian, that is Guatemalan" and "That one was abused worse during roasting," is easy, and useful.

I'm also taking a sip and finishing the phrase, "I wish this espresso were more ..." This throws up a lot of off-balance flavors, and telling thoughts such as " ... more like that first roast I did ... using a pierced vegetable steamer not a solid baking sheet."

The academic in me now wants to construct a database -- a cross-linked concordance of pro, sales, scientific, commonplace and likely flavor terms, including disambiguations, often-found-with terms ("earthy" with "rustic," "complex," "low-acidity," etc) and connotations for good and bad with notes on typical origin and processing characteristics, tentative guesses at aroma compounds -- and where else they occur -- and, related to that, the commonplace "smells like" descriptors; and, last but not least, what experts suggest you can do to get more of the flavor, and less of it.

Ideally, it would be a wiki. Anyone know how? Otherwise, it'll be mind-maps the old-fashioned way.

Today, though, the hedonist in me is dispirited because all five of my current experiments ("let's see what Central and South America taste like as espresso two minutes after first crack") were slow, baked, steamed, underdone, and now I don't like drinking them. Yes, I know, I know. Immediately, I corrected my approach. I abandoned the baking sheet, ripped to pieces a wire-mesh strainer and flattened it into a custom tray, cranked up the thermostat, and lo and behold, 3oz of Brazilians to first crack in 3 mins. Oh, oh, oh. No.

("Ah, young grind-hopper, you are fortunate indeed to be experiencing this so early. When you can snatch the coffee-bean from my hand, you will be ready to surf the e-Bay in search of a third-hand Pavoni ...")

So. Descriptors of the day:

peasy -- I assume this is the correct term for what is indeed like a faint smell of uncooked dried peas coming up to the boil. Take six or eight raw chana dal (yellow split pea) and rub them between your palms with a teaspoonful of water. Inhale. That's the essence of it turned up to a much higher volume. Not violently nasty, but definitively raw. Must be some enzyme warning the human digestive system that this means stomach-ache.

flat -- the beans, even three days post-roast, do not smell enough to be convincing, and -- this is particularly heartbreaking -- even when only just ground. This lack of aroma characterizes the brew, too. The grinds even smell a little bit tired-green-vegetably behind what coffee aroma they do have. Tired is another good word to describe it. Not stale, just exhausted before they even start. This one is hard to explain. It was easiest noticed by comparison with a roast that had worked.

acrid -- I think is the right word -- it bites slightly on the sides and at the back of the tongue, in the skin where there aren't taste-buds. Faintly corrosive, "sore throat" sensation, as at the beginning of a cold. I have until now associated this with burnt and scorched beans. Not just, it seems.

a wonderfully vivid and distinctive tongue sensation for which I have no word. It's neither ordinary bitter (largely back-of-the-tongue) nor ordinary sour (saliva-provoking), but a sensation of something in between and combined. It's not astringent. It's like tasting bitter in all the places on the tongue where you'd expect something to taste acidic; it's a lightweight, bright, slightly clinging, whole-tongue bitter, as though the inside of my mouth had been flash-coated with microdroplets of quinine. Is this "lemon-peel"? Trigonelline?

"Thanks, Jason I'll try to post either briefishly, or seldomishly."

No, please continue to bring it on full blast!

Aha.

Thank you for kindly encouragement re verbiage! --

I'm off to find out more about those woody/cereal flavors. As they say, if life hands you lemon-peel ...

(I believe it's early days for me to grind finer and down-dose. I tried, with muddy outcomes. I will keep trying and, well, regarding better grinders, who am I to deny the still small voice of covetousness when it whispers Zassenhaus unto mine ear? But for the moment I love my little Beatrice; and, after all, I'm still working out which shades of blond induce what degrees of bitterness ... Heavens. It really is a lexical minefield out here.)

Oh, don't forget to include the mouth feel from the Coffee Lexicon. It might be the little brother of taste and smell but it should still get a seat at the table.

Another_Jim brings up the eternal adage of an investment in q good coffee grinder being an investment in good coffee. Having switched my brilliant little hand cranked Pharos recently I want to echo the point.

I do not forget mouth-feel. It is an important section of my Concordance.

Bitters in coffee. Wow. They are numerous, interlinked, variable depending on roast, not particularly well understood: trigonelline, caffeic acid, quinic acid, nicotinic acid (Vit B3, hurrah!), caffeine (albeit barely if at all detectable as a bitter taste) caramelized sugars, various Maillard compounds, many many others.

I started at the beginning. Slowly, the planet began to cool ...

Bitter plant compounds are usually warnings: I'm toxic. But most poisons are stimulants in small quantities. Many plant bitters therefore are tonic, wakeful, bracing, medicinal. Bitterness also stimulates the gall bladder. Hence bitter aperitifs and digestifs, and the natural affinity between fat food and bitter plant flavors in cooking.

A small dose of an aromatic, bitter, mildly stimulant liquid would, in theory, be a good way in the morning to prepare the body for food and movement.

Green coffee contains several bitter compounds. Roasting breaks down some, especially trigonelline, into smaller aromatic molecules, and also produces new bitters. As the roast continues, caramelization produces even more different bitter tastes.

So, is espresso bitter? The forums offer answers that I think fall into three main categories:

1. Compared with food in general and taking mother's milk as the original yardstick, yes, of course -- like grapefruit, real ale, Campari and 90%-cocoa-solid chocolate.
2. Relative to other espressos, maybe ... "bitter" is just one taste in coffee along with acid, sweet and maybe slight salt/savory -- if the bitterness stands out so much that you don't like it, either the espresso is typical and you just don't like espresso, or the bitterness is out of balance and you can tweak it; so, first, do you like bitter? -- then, what's your roast, grind, dose, tamp? -- and have you cleaned the machine lately? --
3. Mine isn't.

After reading a lot of interesting experiments (Jim -- I can't believe you divided spent pucks horizontally into three -- how?), I did my own crude tests with light and dark roasts, coarser and finer grinds. For me, bitternesses fall into three main categories:

1. Overall, always, some proper, integral, background bitterness. Natch. It's coffee.
2. The effect of the light-roast bitters which include undegraded or partly broken-down trigonelline and other organic bitter compounds; it's "lemon-peel" bitter, grapefruit-pithy, green wood juice -- almost acerbic -- all over the tongue, not astringent but light and intense, cringey -- these bitters extract early, easily; they are those of which Jim Schulman advises to grind finer, dose down ...
3. Bitterness that is more noticeable in my second-crack roasts. Caramelized and Maillard tastes; lingering on the back of the tongue; roasted-bitter, like pan-juices from meat; if taken too far,"burnt"; perhaps these are larger molecules which in a darker roast would strongly characterize the "third ten seconds," the final, bitter, weak portion of a 30-sec extraction.

If indeed the pithy-light-bitters are smaller molecules that extract earlier and the dark-roast-bitters are larger molecules that extract later in an espresso, then the trick of dumping the first few drops should work more noticeably for bitter light roasts, while cutting short the shot to sweeten it should work more noticeably for bitter dark roasts. Well, O.K. -- I should try this out, too.

Grinding finer, dosing down seems to increase the aroma and acidity of the light roast, and the bitterness becomes less noticeable -- up to a point. But my grinder is dodgy, so take "up to a point" with a pinch of salt.

Speaking of which, do you know that sneaky cheat? This is horrible, wonderful. The sensation of bitterness in the taste-buds is interfered with by sodium ions (Na+). The Scandinavians and some others add salt to coffee, or eat salt meat with it. By very lightly salting an espresso, you can substantially reduce perceived bitterness without being able to distinguish the salt.

This explains partly why my salted Malabar was so tasty a few posts ago. But that was with a generous pinch. You can use much less.

I say this having tested it only on light-roast bitters in a flat, baked, barely-1C Costa Rican that was nastily "grapefruit-pith" bitter (even after several finer-grind-down-doses resulting in 8g almost-Turkish hard-tamped in a double basket and extracted to just blonde in over 30s ... in a Presso, for God's sake ... my arms are killing me ...). Half a pinch of powdered salt. Either it was perfect auto-suggestion or the citrus-pith just disappeared. Hoo boy. I wonder who is using this on the quiet to generate magically sweet espressos ... no, surely not. Nobody would. I might.

That mellowness of monsooned coffee, exposed to the sea air. I wonder. And hard water. Hard with what? A few extra sodium ions?

I'd be interested to know whether others have experimented with this.

Anyway, leaving that intriguing temptation on one side, after all this experimentation and writing I only managed to clarify two flavors for myself:

pith-bitter (light roast; largely, unbroken-down or barely-broken-down green coffee bitters; often alongside higher acidity and more varietal character; extracts early, too bad.)
dark-bitter (dark roast; largely, caramelization bitters; often associated with lower acidity, and more roasted flavors; extracts more noticeably later in the shot)

I rejected "lemon-peel" for the first, because to me that evokes the yellow skin and highly aromatic zest too, which gets in the way of thinking just of the taste on the tongue. Similarly, I don't find it helpful to think of the dark bitters as "roasted bitter" or "caramelization bitter" because those terms also evoke too much smell: respectively, toasty roasty nuts or meat, and sugary cooking candy.

However, despite the labor to extract them, "pith-bitter" and "dark-bitter" are going to be useful to me. They characterize different roast levels, and they extract differently. Therefore they are balanced or steered in an espresso in different ways, and it's important to distinguish between them.

How to steer them is ably dealt with elsewhere ...

Re lever machines -- that's interesting -- highs and lows as in quality? or pressure? -- I'm finding that if I grind finer for the Presso, I have to down-dose or it chokes. And if I really go for it, the machine arms flex, which is alarming to me.

Re grinders ... time8theuniverse, did you switch to, or from, a Pharos? A Zassenhaus I could get in a couple of months, when I know something. A Pharos would mean waiting several months longer, deciding I'm overcommitted to home espresso, and reordering spending priorities

Postscript on bitters: I suddenly thought to try them all again while holding my nose. Rinsed in between with tap water.

Raw coffee beans don't taste bitter. It takes some chewing, though, to tell.
Light-roast are tangily bitter; so is instant coffee; burnt beans are the same kind of bitter, but also prickly on the uvula, with a long ashy bitter taste; burnt sugar is similar, but then the bitterness lasts longer on the back of the tongue and in the back of the throat.

So I now think there is less difference than I thought between pith-bitter and dark-bitter, though still some difference; and it's the associations with other flavors and aromas that make them seem distinctly different in espresso. I think.

I switched to a Pharos. Its so good at what it does. It really does Turkish to Press. It is an expensive hand grinder but really its just an awesome grinder (comparable to, or better, than the big commercial grinders) because it distorts the flavours so little. I got by with a cheap electric grinder for a long time but I have seen the light (its named after a lighthouse, so that's a pun). I'll have the Pharos for along time to come.

I have spent too much on coffee equipment these last week few weeks and it could be worse by the end of the week. It will only equate to a week of night shift . I guess I'm saying that for coffee flavours the coffee beans are the most important.. But I like shiny thing too.

Oh dear. I can has shiny thingz, pls, too? I'm a sucker for functional design.

Clearly, so far as bitter, acid and sweet are concerned, I won't know what I'm doing until I have a grinder I can rely on absolutely. For the grinder to cost 3X the machine would certainly exemplify correct priorities in espresso. The rest of life might feel a little bruised. I expect a nice poultice of spent grounds would sort that out.

But the point is not so much about the coffees tasting as good as they possibly can (at the moment) as being able to describe what they do taste like.

While I'm dithering about seeing the light (I like the pun), I ate roast chicken and lentils last night with a bottle of very young cheap Italian pinot noir. I swallowed a mouthful, took a swig and BAM: Yirgacheffe.

Hilarious. Meaty Maillard + alpha or beta ionone, maybe damascenone = my dinner tastes of coffee.