Coffee Tree

Note Profile

Botanical

About

Humid green wood and dark leaves, with roast only as a shadow

Scent Profile

Green leads because the one glossary source leads with it in its first word: 'Green, woody, faintly earthy - the tree, not the bean.' Dry_woody sits just under it, held up by the same sentence's 'humid wood' and by Fragrantica filing the note under Woods and mosses rather than under greens. Earthy is 'faintly earthy' and 'earthy-bitter vegetal quality', named twice. Coffee_cacao is the hardest number here and it is capped low on purpose: the source calls the roast 'the ghost of future roast underneath', which is a phrase about absence. Scoring it near coffee's 0.85 would make this note a weak duplicate of coffee, and the source says the opposite. White_floral is the jasmine-scented, linalool-dominant blossom, kept under 0.25 because that flower is already published as coffee-blossom and this note should not restate it. Floral, tropical, aromatic_herbal, a damp mossy_chypre edge and traces of sour, creamy_woody and amber_resinous run below. Spreads are, the widest in this batch, because the species behind the name is not settled.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeHeart · ~5h lasting

Family Green & Aromatic, Woody & Earthy

Read off the wheel, not a label applied to the note.

Origin

Scored as the coffee plant, Coffea arabica or Coffea canephora: the bark, leaves and green wood rather than the beans. The name is ambiguous. 'Coffee tree' is also the common name of Gymnocladus dioicus, the Kentucky coffeetree, an unrelated legume named only because settlers roasted its seeds as a coffee substitute. I chose Coffea for two reasons a reviewer can check. Fragrantica files this note under Woods and mosses and separately publishes Coffee and Coffee Blossom from the same plant, which makes a third Coffea term coherent. And the Kentucky coffeetree's wood is recorded by The Wood Database as having 'no characteristic odor', which gives a perfumer nothing to name a note after. No extract of either tree is sold, so the note is a composed one either way.

Usage in Perfumery

Fragrantica counts 4 perfumes and files the term under Woods and mosses. Parfumo does not carry it. The note is reached for as a place rather than an ingredient: the plantation and the standing plant, used where coffee itself would bring the roast and the gourmand weight that this note is meant to avoid.