Knowledge centre
Acidity, body and finish, explained
Three words on every tasting note and rarely explained. They describe different sensations, and they can be judged separately.
Acidity
Acidity is the lively, often fruity impression at the start of a sip, not sharpness and not bitterness. Under the Specialty Coffee Association’s standards it is recorded as an attribute of its own, separate from sweetness and body.
Body
Body is the perceived fullness in the mouth: thin, medium, syrupy, silky. World Coffee Research’s Sensory Lexicon treats texture and mouthfeel as their own group of attributes with defined references, so that two assessors mean the same thing.
Finish
The finish is what remains after swallowing: the length, the cleanliness and the character of the aftertaste. A long finish is no proof of quality; a clean one says rather more.
Why it matters when buying
A coffee with high acidity and a light body carries milk drinks less well than one with medium acidity and a full body. The three terms together say more about suitability than any overall score.
Telling acidity, pH and sweetness apart
Quality and strength of acidity
Classic cupping scores the quality of the acidity, not only its strength. A strong acidity is not automatically a good one.
pH is not taste
The pH value is a chemical measurement. Perceived acidity is a sensory impression. The two are related but do not replace each other.
Sweetness, °Brix and sugar
A cup described as sweet, a high °Brix reading in the cherry juice and a chemically measured sugar content are three different statements. Each needs its own sample, method and unit.
In the coffee journey: Station 04 · Ripeness and °Brix · Station 09 · Chemical laboratory
In short
- Acidity, body and finish are separate attributes, not steps on one scale.
- The WCR Sensory Lexicon (version 2.0, 2017) defines 110 attributes with reference samples.
- The SCA records sensory attributes in standards 102 to 105.
Sources
Everything this article states rests on the sources below. Where our own catalogue is the source, it says so, and those figures can be counted on the product pages.
- World Coffee Research: Sensory Lexicon, version 2.0, Sensory Analysis Center, Kansas State University (2017) worldcoffeeresearch.org
- Specialty Coffee Association: Coffee Value Assessment: standards 102 to 105, SCA 102 · 103 · 104 · 105 (2026) sca.coffee
- Specialty Coffee Association: Coffee Standards (2026) sca.coffee
- Specialty Coffee Association of America: SCAA Protocols: Cupping Specialty Coffee, revised 16.12.2015, p. 10, copy at coffeecloud.one (2015)
- Darveris Rivas: Cerezómetro: la herramienta que permite mejorar los procesos de cosecha del café, Se Habla Café, 28.05.2020 (2020) sehablacafe.com
- Zerpa, G.; Rivas, D.; Hernández, E.; Zambrano, A.: Calidad fisicoquímica y sensorial de café del estado Mérida, Ciencia e Ingeniería 46 (2), DOI 10.5281/zenodo.15320514 (2025) doi.org