Body has to do with tactile impression – the “texture”, what it “feels” like in your mouth and on your tongue. It is an extremely personal sensation or perception. Body is created by the oils and sugars that remain undissolved in the brewed coffee and provide a feeling of weight or heft.

Taste is obviously what the coffee tastes like but sometimes it is difficult to find the right word to use considering that we perceive all food through multiple senses and sometimes the smell, or aroma, and even the texture, or body, can influence what we think it should taste like before it even reaches our lips.

Aroma is the smell of the roasted beans or the brewed coffee as you lift the cup to you mouth. Take the time to experience the aroma before taking your first sip. Aroma is very important to your enjoyment of coffee as taste and smell are closely linked. The human body has receptors for both taste and smell so your perception of aroma is a real physiological response to molecules in the air. When you have a cold, food tastes different. Well, it doesn’t really taste different, it’s just that you are less sensitive to smell and the combination of taste and smell are so intertwined that you perceive the overall experience differently. Researchers have found that when volunteers wore nose plugs, their sense of taste was less accurate and less intense than when they tasted the food without the nose plugs. Some researchers claim that smell is responsible for up to 80% of what we taste.