For three years every bag we sold said something like blackcurrant, cacao nib, a long jasmine finish. Customers kept telling us, politely, that they could not taste any of it. They were right, and it was our fault.
A tasting note is a memory aid for the person who wrote it. It compresses a whole cupping session — the temperature of the room, the six other coffees on the table, what the roaster was hoping to find — into four words. Read cold, at home, out of a mug, those words describe nothing you can check.
So the bags now say three things: how the coffee was processed, how dark we roasted it, and one plain sentence. Sweet and round, good with milk. Bright, better black. That is the information we would want if we were buying.
We still cup every batch, and we still write the long notes. They just live in the roasting log, where they are useful.