Editorial · A 2026 guide
The coffee palate quiz.
Most coffee discovery happens by guessing — you scan a menu of tasting notes written by roasters, for roasters, and hope. The Cascara palate quiz turns that into a five-minute exercise. Eleven questions, your Cellar Identity at the end, and from then on every bean in the cellar is sorted by fit instead of hype.
Take the quiz now.
Free, no signup to start. Eleven questions, five minutes.
Start the quiz →What the quiz does.
Specialty coffee has roughly four directions a cup can lean. Bright and floral. Balanced and chocolatey. Juicy and fruit-forward. Funky and fermented. The Cascara palate quiz asks eleven questions about taste preferences you already have — in wine, chocolate, fruit, savory food, beer, tea — and translates your answers into four affinity scores against those four corners.
The output is your Cellar Identity. One of four kites: Clean, Classic, Fluid, or Experimental. It's a starting point, not a verdict — every brew you log after the quiz updates the model. By brew ten the recommendations are sharper than the quiz alone could produce.
The point isn't to label you. The point is to give you a shortcut. When you walk into a cafe and see a menu of beans, your kite cuts the search problem from “sixteen choices, no idea which” to “these three are most likely to be the cup I want.”
How Cascara organizes coffee
The four corners of the Process Spectrum.
Bright, floral, tea-like. Washed Kenya, washed Ethiopia, high-altitude Latin Americans.
Balanced, chocolatey, familiar. Natural Brazil, washed Colombia, blend espressos.
Juicy, fruit-forward, sweet. Honey Costa Rica, semi-washed Indonesia, naturals from Yirgacheffe.
Funky, fermented, unconventional. Co-fermented Colombia, anaerobic Rwanda, thermal-shock lots.
Why eleven questions?
Eleven is the smallest number that gives a stable signal across all four spectrum corners. Fewer than eight and the model over-weights any single answer. More than fifteen and the marginal sharpness drops below the marginal cost of attention — people abandon the quiz before finishing.
The questions are deliberately not about coffee. Asking “do you like fruity coffee?” is useless if you haven't been drinking specialty long enough to know what fruity even means in a cup. So we ask about wine. About chocolate. About the snacks you reach for. The taste signals are the same; the context is one you already have.
We do ask a few coffee-specific questions toward the end, but they're scaffolded by the earlier ones — by Q9 we already have a directional read on your palate, so a question about brewed-coffee strength or natural-vs-washed preference becomes a calibration check, not a cold-start.
Sample beans by identity.
Once you have your kite, every bean in the cellar is filterable by fit. Here's a snapshot — one bean per identity, drawn from the current cellar.
What you do with the result.
In a cafe. Pull up your kite, look at the menu, pick the bean closest to your dominant corner. You'll be right more often than not — and when you're wrong, the wrong cup teaches the model something.
Buying beans online. Browse the Cascara directory and filter by identity. Roasters across the Philippines and beyond are tagged by the spectrum corners their beans lean toward.
In your kitchen. Log every brew you make. Bean, method, what you tasted, whether you'd order it again. The model updates after each entry. Most people see a noticeable sharpening of their recommendations by brew 5–10.
Subscribing to the Drop. When subscriptions open in Q3 2026, your kite is what we use to pick your monthly bag. Calibrating now means your first Drop already reflects what your mouth wants — more on the subscription here.
Five minutes. Eleven questions. Free.
No commitment, no signup to start. Your kite is yours from the moment you finish.
Start calibrating →Common questions.
How long does the coffee palate quiz take?
Five minutes, eleven questions. You get your Cellar Identity at the end — a snapshot of which corner of the Process Spectrum your palate leans toward (Clean, Classic, Fluid, or Experimental).
Is the palate quiz free?
Yes. The full eleven-question calibration is free, and your Cellar Identity is yours to keep. We don't gate your result behind payment — the paid tier is the matched monthly Drop subscription, which is opt-in and opens Q3 2026.
Do I need to know coffee tasting notes to take the quiz?
No. Most questions are framed as preferences you already have — sweet vs. savory snacks, dry vs. fruity wine, dark chocolate vs. milk chocolate. The model translates everyday taste cues into coffee-specific palate axes. You don't need to know what a 'washed Kenya' tastes like to answer.
How accurate is the coffee palate quiz?
Eleven questions gives a directional read, not a verdict. Cascara's calibration is the starting point — every brew you log after that sharpens the model. By brew 5–10, the recommendations are noticeably more aligned than what the quiz produced on its own.
What if my taste in coffee changes?
Palates drift over time, especially as you drink more specialty. You can recalibrate any time from your settings — same eleven questions, fresh result. We also re-weight your model continuously based on what you've been rating recently, so it adapts even if you don't manually recalibrate.
Read next.
How to read coffee tasting notes
Why “blueberry, brown sugar, jasmine” on a coffee bag isn't random — and how to use those notes once you have a kite.
Washed vs. natural vs. honey: coffee processing explained
The biggest variable in how a coffee tastes after terroir — and the axis the Process Spectrum is built around.
Specialty coffee in the Philippines — a 2026 guide
140+ roasters across Metro Manila, Baguio, Cebu, Davao — organized by palate, not hype.