Our tasting group collaborated to construct the perfect coffee in the Harvard dining hall. A coffee drink is composed of many parts–theres coffee, there’s sugar, and there’s the milk. But because there are so many different kinds of coffee and a long list of different kinds of milk and sugar, we decided to do the work for the coffee drinker to find the perfect combination. We diviided ourselves separately and taste tested these three ingredients. Once we completed our part, we combined our findings to make the “perfect cup o’ joe.”

Step 1 was finding the right coffee (conducted by Alex H.), and step 2 involves finding the perfect milk.

I decided to taste test five of the numerous types of milk found in a Harvard dining hall–coffee creamer, 1% fat milk, fat free milk, original-flavored soy milk, and vanilla-flavored soy milk. My tasting plan was as follows:

  1. Look at the cup of milk.
  2. Swirl the cup and see what happens.
  3. Swirl the cup and smell the milk.
  4. Taste the milk.
  5. Rinse palate with water.
  6. Move to the next cup of milk and repeat.

Below are my observations after parallel tasting:

I never knew that milk could be so drastically different from each other. For the perfect cup of coffee, I found that vanilla soy milk would be the ideal type of milk to blend with coffee because of its thick consistency, sweet smell, and punch of flavor.