Reviews for Thanksgiving Coffee
Rich, balanced, deeply dimensioned, sweet and mouthfilling at the front end, a touch bitter toward the finish. Meadowy hints of flowers waft in the sweetness.
Rich, sweet, with a gentle lift from the acidity, complicated by pronounced chocolate fruit tones (think chocolate-covered cherries). The body reads as bigger than it is owing to the general richness of the cup. Not much range or complexity, but a fundamentally pleasing cup.
A richly expansive, deeply dimensioned coffee, caramelly, smooth, with an elegant balance of slightly bitter roasty notes, sweetness, and a gently fruity acidity.
Medium bodied but light-footed; smooth, sweet, and buoyant with exhilarating lemon and chocolate tones. A slight pungency balances the cup.
A coffee that requires patience. The aroma is rather flat, the cup smoothly full but inert. A pleasant chocolate sensation surprises in the finish, however, and the aftertaste is sweet, rich and long.
Powerful yet smooth and sweetly balanced. The acidity is round and ripe. High-toned fruit -- pears perhaps -- deepen toward roasty dry prune and bittersweet chocolate in the finish.
A coffee that meets us with a smile, giving everything out front: gently brisk acidity, a touch of wine-toned fruit, floral sweetness. Thereafter it stands pat, light-bodied and balanced, perhaps a bit shallow in dimension.
A gentle cup that seduces rather than imposes. Saved from the ordinary by a soft, rounded complexity and impressive dimension. Warmly pungent tones, faintly tobaccoish or herby, soften toward chocolate in the finish.
A fine example of the French-roast archetype. The carbon notes, as integral to French roasts as smoky notes are to Scotch whiskey, are discreet. The main taste complex here is sweet vanilla, floating above a dry, light pungency. Carbon notes prevail in the aftertaste, though a persistent low-toned sweetness gives them a run.
A complete but rather simple profile; decent acidity balances the pungency of the moderately dark roast. Hints of vanilla intensify and the entire profile sweetens as the coffee cools.
A superbly balanced coffee, with a low-toned, slightly winy acidity, a touch of vanilla in the nose, and a solid, dark-roast bottom with little in the way of carbony distraction.
The aromatics of the vanilla-chocolate complex fade fast under the impact of the carbon, although the clean-sweat pungency will please lovers of extremely dark roasts. The blanketing astringency of the carbon reaches a climax in the aftertaste, but even there sweetness balances and pungency complicates.
I found this blend low-toned and pungently fruity, although the fruitiness was dry rather than sweet. For me the pungency turned pleasantly round, sweet, and chocolaty when combined with milk. My tasting colleague didn't respond to the pungency in any context. She found this blend too sharp in a demitasse and too thin in milk.
This coffee is so complex at the top that it positively levitates, alive with sweet, light vanilla tones. In the finish whatever is left of the body vanishes, the vanilla tones fade, but the sweetness lingers.
