A crossmodal taste test · 16 plates · about 60 seconds

Swipe to find your coffee profile.

Coffee & Claude · Sat 21 or Sun 22 Nov · London E1 A morning of specialty coffee tasting and building your first AI skill, at Hermanos Coffee Roasters. Seats are limited. Join the waitlist ↗

Your eyes already have opinions about flavour.

Oxford researchers have shown that colour, shape and texture change how sweet, sour or bitter the same coffee tastes. Swipe right on the plates you like and left on the ones you don't. We'll read a flavour profile from your choices and point you to coffees that fit it.

←Swipe leftif you don't like it

→Swipe rightif you like it

Living Room Labs

The science behind the plates

You taste with your eyes.

People link colours, shapes and textures to tastes and smells in consistent ways. Researchers call these crossmodal correspondences. Every plate in this test is built from cues that have held up in published studies, several of them run on specialty coffee.

01
Colour → taste
452 people in China, India, Malaysia and the USA matched pink to sweet, green to sour, black to bitter and white to salty. Pink–sweet and black–bitter held in every country.
Wan et al., 2014 ↗
02
Shape → taste
Rounded shapes like clouds read as sweet. Angular shapes, crosses and squares read as bitter or sour.
Wan et al., 2014 ↗
03
Shape → smell
Lemon and pepper smells were matched to angular shapes, raspberry and vanilla to round ones. More intense smells pulled toward angular forms.
Hanson-Vaux, Crisinel & Spence, 2013 ↗
04
Cup colour → coffee
Across 457 people, the colour of the cup changed how sweet and acidic a Brazilian and a Kenyan specialty coffee were expected and judged to be. When cup colour and coffee clashed, people liked the coffee less.
Carvalho & Spence, 2019 ↗
05
Cup texture → coffee
The same coffee tasted sweeter from a smooth cup, and more acidic with a drier aftertaste from a rough one. Certified Q-graders were fooled as well as amateurs.
Carvalho, Moksunova & Spence, 2020 ↗
06
Mug colour → intensity
A latte drunk from a white mug was rated more intense and less sweet than the same latte from a clear or blue one.
Van Doorn, Wuillemin & Spence, 2014 ↗
07
Lightness → intensity
People pick lighter colours for weaker smells and deeper, more saturated colours for stronger ones.
Kemp & Gilbert, 1997, in Spence, 2020 ↗
08
Texture on its own is weak
Pictures of textures alone produce only moderate links, such as fluffy with sweet. That is why every plate here stacks colour, shape and texture.
Barbosa Escobar et al., 2022 ↗

How your result is calculated

Each of the 16 plates carries a score on five dimensions (sweet, bright, floral, intense and cocoa/body) based on its colour, shape and texture cues. A right swipe adds the plate's scores, and a left swipe takes away half. Plates appear in a different random order for everyone to avoid order effects. Totals are normalised per dimension, and you get the nearest of four flavour profiles by cosine similarity.

One caution: people also match things they simply like to round shapes, so part of every result is just liking (Velasco et al.). The research shows that images change expectation and perception, but it hasn't shown that they predict preference. Treat your result as a starting point, then come and taste for yourself in November.

Swipe to find your coffee profile.

Now taste it for real.

Which coffee are your friends?