Tasting Guide™ 02 – The Guide
In 1963, NASA scientists faced a problem of rather cosmic proportions: how to track spacecraft billions of miles away with limited resources and unpredictable signal behavior. They assembled their best rocket scientists and engineers and painted a beautiful and living network of plotted data points, constantly reacting to time, position, and intensity. That system became the Deep Space Network, and it laid the groundwork for a new way of seeing the relationships between ever volatile information. In the same spirit, our Tasting Guides act as the same visual method to track the nuance and complexity of flavor—not as static notes, but as interactive data. Because taste doesn’t exist in isolation. It exists in tension, in rhythm, in relationship within our harmonic bodily systems via a ever-evolving medium: coffee.
I shaped the Tasting Guide™ to be on a two-axis grid. Left to right measures where you experience a note: palate (left) or nose (right). Top to bottom measures intensity: higher up means more dominant. The numbers represent individual flavor notes experienced during tasting. What you see is a constellation—a plotted series of sensory inputs based on how our, or hopefully your, palate experiences the given lot of coffee.
Take Sebastian Ramirez infamous White Honey Gesha, a coffee I'm particularly fond of, for example. You might encounter a high, mid-right note for bergamot rinds (aromatic and light), a center-low left note for earl grey tea (tongue-rooted), and a bold, top-left signal for lemongrass acidity. It tells a story. And like a satellite arc or a signal flare, every note has a position. Hence the DNS inspiration. Of course the rocket scientists were ahead of their time.
Position
Where a note appears reveals how you actually experienced it. A note toward the right? Your olfactory system did the heavy lifting. A note closer to the left? That was a tactile gustatory sensation on the tongue. High up? That note hit us strong. Lower down? Softer, supporting, or subtle.
In other words, the chart reflects not just what is tasted, but how it tasted.
Unique to Promethium
Traditional flavor notes on bags and boxes alone flatten experience into categories and leave ninety percent of a coffees richness to the void. The Tasting Guide™ turns it into a terrain. It lets us see flavor as a living system—a structure of perception as real and responsive as the one NASA designed for deep space.
Not Just Flavor Notes
The goal of the Tasting Guide™ isn’t to be right, it’s about being in tune with the coffee and ourselves. And in a rapidly growing market where coffee is often reduced to marketing terms or buzzwords, this is a return to the to undeniable science of human nature. Let's take it back to your own individual knowledge as the most valid guide experiencing the coffee for yourself with our team's own experience of it. Truly being an enthusiast.
