As specialty coffee has expanded, so has an appreciation for espresso. Sure, the trend was started by Starbucks, but with great roasters making great blends, people have seen just how jaw-dropping it can be and not surprisingly they want more. They want it at their cafes, in their homes, and increasingly, in their offices. Some offices have found a way to do this successfully. Google, for example, has a fully trained, full time barista as their office coffee. That's great, but unless you own the internet (hyperbole), it seems a little impractical.
How Better Coffee Tastes: Stumptown Latins Visualized
We love infographics/data-visualizations here at Joyrideas you might have noticed from past blog posts such as Coffee and the Economy, Tracking Caffeine with Style, and Coffee Export Data Visualization. And while we normally share work by others that we find interesting, from time to time, we roll up our sleeves, compile our own data sets, and generate our own visualizations, made possible by some very cool (and free) online resources, such as Many Eyes. Why data visualization, why infographics? Well, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and an infographic is a picture on steroids! In particular we enjoy how data visualization affords us new perspectives on familiar facts and info. For example, today we decided to see if any trends emerge when we compile several flavor descriptions together and visualize them as a set. Specifically, we aggregated the flavor profile descriptions of Stumptown's 2012 Latin America offerings.
We collated the descriptions for all of Stumptown's current Latin offerings, removing articles, prepositions, pronouns, etc., to hone in on the adjectives, adverbs, and verbs. The infographic that follows spatially represents the frequency with which certain words are used. As the graphic indicates, the three most common flavors used to describe this year's Latin offerings are Caramel, Apple, and Chocolate:
It will be interesting to see how the Latins compare to the African descriptions or the Indonesian description. It would also be kind of cool to see how the popularity of specific words changes from year to year. After all, it was just two years ago that apparently everything tasted Meyer Lemons. Now that I can finally buy a Meyer Lemon at Fairway, it's use in coffee flavor profiling has all but disappeared.