The Coffee Tasting Handbook A Toolkit for Tasting Your Cup

The coffee drinker's essential guide to discovering and appreciating coffee's distinctive flavors - enabling you to buy and enjoy coffee at home and in cafés with confidence every time.

The Coffee Tasting Handbook is the coffee drinker's essential guide to discovering and appreciating coffee's distinctive flavors, to buy better coffee and to enjoy each time.

With 800 possible aromatic compounds, your daily coffee is packed full of unique flavors, but the array of possible flavor combinations can make tasting coffee overwhelming. Beneath the complexity, however, delicious coffees have an orderly structure.

Coffee expert and entrepreneur Tim Ridley introduces his one-of-a-kind 'coffee tasting framework', complete with coffee tasting worksheet, coffee aroma map and coffee flavor wheel, to explain:
- The defining flavor characteristics of each coffee
- Why some coffees are tastier than others
- How coffee drinkers can identify the coffee they will enjoy

With step-by-step guidance, easy to follow diagrams and gorgeous lifestyle photography, The Coffee Tasting Handbook brings together a history of coffee, the science of flavor and the links between taste and terroir.

A celebration of the pleasure of drinking coffee, whatever flavors you favor, this handbook is the essential purchase for any coffee lover.

Tim Ridley is a coffee expert based in London and the founder of United Baristas, a network of 10,000 international baristas. He established Department of Coffee and Social Affairs, one of London's first quality coffee shops, which introduced flat whites and cold brew to a mainstream audience. He grew the business to seven sites over five years before exiting in 2015. Many of the ideas in The Coffee Tasting Handbook were germinated during Tim's time as a coffee-shop owner, when he was sourcing and roasting a wide range of coffees to meet customers' aspirations.

Tim is a go-to coffee expert:
- He has appeared on BBC Radio 4's Sliced Bread and The Long View, and is frequently interviewed about topical coffee issues on local and national radio.
- He wrote a regular column for Caffeine Magazine for three years - he has written about coffee for Stylist, Good Food Magazine and has been interviewed for The Times, CityAM and The Telegraph.
- He is a judge for the Guild of Fine Food's Great Taste Awards.