Sensometric for the chemical odor code characterization of different coffee aroma notes.

The perception elicited from drinking a cup of coffee is a complex multisensory experience. The involvement of all our senses together with emotions and cognitive processes implied with tasting modulate the perception [1, 2]. Aroma is a primary hedonic aspect of a good coffee and plays a fundamental role in the coffee choice [3] and can be considered as a signature of the products [4, 5]. The cup tasting is nowadays the most important criteria to define the coffee quality, nevertheless it remains a critical subjective evaluation and the training of a panel of aligned experts is difficult and time-consuming. The chemistry behind the sensory experience is far from being clarified and both compositional data and sensory information alone neither fully explain the importance of key aroma compounds, nor indicate which of them is the origin of a distinct sensory attribute(s). The aim of this work is the sensometric investigation of the relationships between volatiles compounds of roasted coffees and sensory attributes in the characterization of the chemical odor code of different coffee notes [6-7]. Volatiles from different roasted coffee samples characterized from distinctive sensory attributes were analyzed by HS-SPME-GC-MS, and the results compared to those from sensory evaluation. Sensometric results show that the aroma profiling has proven to be: 1. discriminative, since they describe differences between samples with diverse sensory attributes; 2. informative, since they show the degrees of the association between chemical compounds and sensory evaluation and the quali-quantitative identification of the volatiles related to a peculiar attributes; 3. predictive, because thanks to the above information it can be used to predict a specific aroma sensory attribute.