Your coffee flavor wheel

A quick field guide

How to use the coffee flavor wheel

By Profilo · Updated October 4, 2026

Start in the middle and work outward. The inner rings give you the broad idea, and the outer ring gives you a more specific word when you can honestly taste one. “Fruity” is a perfectly useful note. If it turns into peach, grape, or another fruit after the coffee cools, keep walking out. If it does not, stop there. The wheel is a tasting aid, not a test you can fail.

This is coffee vocabulary drawn from the SCA's flavor-wheel guide and the World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon, arranged here as one readable wheel. It is useful during a cupping, while teaching a new barista, or when two people are circling around the same coffee and using different words for it. Click a section to see its sub-flavors, or use the profile builder when you want to mark several notes and save them together.

What you can do here

• Click flavors to explore the hierarchy and highlight notes.
• Choose a color treatment and put a logo or photo in the center.
• Download a free PDF, PNG, or SVG, or print the same wheel directly.
• Choose labels inside the wedges or outside the wheel.

The free poster page is the quick, uncustomized reference. This page is the interactive version. The profile builder is for recording a particular coffee. That separation is deliberate: sometimes you need a poster, sometimes you need to poke around, and sometimes you need notes you can find again later.