I recently spent a week in Italy, where the difference between the third-wave palate, if you will, and the palates of the rest of the population, couldn’t be more pronounced. The average Italian coffee drinker prefers robusta to arabica (not a misprint), dark to light, espresso to everything else, and pretty much anything coffee-related that readers of this blog hate to anything they like. But they invented pizza as well as pistachio gelato, so I won't be too hard on them.

Why does the third-wave palate differ so much from that of the rest of the population? There are some obvious reasons (cultural bias), some some fairly obvious reasons (availability bias), and some speculative reasons (bacterial bias).

Say what? Yup, your gut bacteria determine to a large degree what you think tastes good, and it’s possible the polyphenols in coffee shape your gut population and the signals they send you, affecting your preferences. More on that soon.



The typical third waver seeks coffee that’s “interesting” while the average coffee drinker wants drinkability and flavor balance — nothing new there. Both may seek caffeine and pleasure in a cup of coffee, but the third waver probably focuses more on the intellectual pleasure of discovering and discussing flavors, while others seek the more visceral or physical pleasures coffee offers.

I was served an undrinkable, painfully sour Ethiopian espresso in Prague recently. The snooty, unfriendly barista seemed to think underextracted, channeled coffee with the pH of lemon juice was just right. I suppose the coffee was “interesting” but I didn't find any pleasure in it. It was exactly the kind of experience that would forever scare away a newcomer to third-wave coffee, unless that newcomer enjoys straight lemon juice.

There are third-wave companies that do a good job of bridging the gap between interesting flavors and flavor balance— Go Get Em Tiger comes to mind right away, as does St. Ali/Sensory Lab in Melbourne and Doubleshot in Prague, just to name a few. Too many baristas ignore flavor balance while searching for interesting, and i’d like to see more companies emulate those three. I know various people will define balance differently, but I'm referring to a cup that has identifiable sweetness, bitterness, ripeness, and caramels, with perhaps a winey acidity or sourness. A tiny proportion of third-wave coffee meets that criteria.