LATEST REVIEWS

Sweet and fruity in the aroma with raisin and chocolate complication. In the cup delicate in mouthfeel, tartly sweet, and richly and roundly fruity. Cleanly sweet and rich in the short finish, though a slight but not unpleasurable astringency lingers in the long.

Luxuriously sweet, delicately pungent, with tart but lush tropical fruit notes, tamarind perhaps, running through the profile from aroma to finish. The tamarind fruit notes incline toward a richly raisin-toned chocolate in the long finish.

Very sweet aroma with fresh peach and chocolate mid tones and balancing cedar bottom notes. Delicate in the cup with a gently tart acidity wrapped in a rather giddy sweetness. The fruit notes are cleanly wine-like.

The aroma is elegantly simple: toasty and sweet with low-key fruit notes suggesting ripe apricot. Superb in the small cup: velvety mouthfeel, substantial body, deep-toned but crisply dry chocolate and apricot notes, with a long, clean, sweet finish. Solid, chocolaty presence in milk, but the glory here is in the classic but powerful straight shot.

Charred aroma, lean mouthfeel and a bitterish sharpness in the small cup all suggest an overly aggressive roast. But a floral sweetness wafts through the profile and contributes to a fine presence in milk: still a bit lean in mouthfeel but alive with leather, apricot and chocolate notes.

Crisp cedar tones and sweet chocolate in the small cup. In milk the chocolate further blooms and softens, and the cedar tones read as a high-toned sweetly tart fruit (pineapple?).

Subdued but gently elegant aroma. Stiffens a bit in the cup, landing somewhere between crisp and sharp, but with a gentle undercurrent of chocolate sweetness. The fruit and chocolate stop just short of richness in milk.

The aroma is sweet, smoky and toasty. In the small cup the smoky tones complement a dry but lush fruitiness. Comes richly into its own in milk, where the smoke and toast tones read as fresh leather and the dry fruit turns crisply chocolate.

Bittersweet in the small cup, with little nuance or complexity but impressive weight and a buttery presence. The big body carries into milk with predictable power, the simple bittersweetness blooming into an expansively sweet, prune-toned chocolate.

An unusually successful ultra-dark-roasted espresso: the gently burned tones in the aroma develop rather than dominate the pronounced dry fruit and chocolate notes that carry from aroma through small cup into milk, where they bloom with lean but masterful authority.

Big but elegantly leathery aroma laced with chocolate. In the small cup a dry sharpness limits the chocolate tones, but they reassert themselves in milk, blossoming richly with a long, hazelnut-toned finish.

The Gimme!Coffee package describes this blend's aroma as "Centennial Harley leather." I can-t say much about Centennial or Harley, but I'd agree on the leather, with maybe a kinky smear of chocolate thrown in. Flavor is described as "Dive Bar Chic." As a dive bar innocent I'd call it dense, simple, but big and balanced, with more leather and perhaps some pleasantly pungent cedar notes. No leather makes it into the milk, but a very pleasant, high-toned chocolate-and-nuts sweetness does.

Richly and elegantly roasty and bittersweet in aroma and small cup with high-toned, pear-like fruit shimmering at the top. The finish is heavy and slightly bitter, a liability in the small cup but an advantage in milk, where the dairy turns the cup deeply yet lyrically sweet with a whole candy-counterful of sophisticated chocolate tones.

Superb single-shot espresso distinguished by its fruit tones and general resonant depth of sensation. The aroma is robustly fruity and sweet, the small cup roundly and sweetly roasty with toast and chocolate notes. Simplifies slightly in milk but still agreeably expresses a high-toned, fruity chocolate.

Fresh cut cedar and fruit. The fruit richly and sweetly dominates in the aroma. In the small cup the cedar complicates and gives a resiny authority to the fruit. The fruit and cedar turn to an intriguingly pungent chocolate in milk.

Serenely balanced yet powerfully complete. Low-key, roundly rich in the small cup, with dry fruit and bittersweet chocolate notes. Masters milk with crisp, quiet assurance: fresh leather, milk chocolate, dry fruit.

Sweetly lyric with delicate but lushly complex high notes in the aroma. The softly lyric character carries into the cup, where the indeterminate aromatic complexity gives way to dramatic floral high notes and Meyer lemon and chocolate midtones.

The aroma is intense but narrow in range and lacking nuance. In the cup definitively flat, with a flavor-dampening mustiness that reads as dull mildew rather than rich earth. Brightened only by a faintly woody sweetness and the barest hint of acidity. Nominated anonymously.

A thoroughly dispirited coffee, with little sweetness and limited nuance aside from hints of nondescript fruit and a sort of vegetal, slightly charred cocoa. This particular sample appears to consist of green coffees of ordinary to poor quality that were poorly roasted to boot. Presumably nominating reader C. Dowling got luckier than I did when he was inspired to nominate this blend as a "mellow ... all-around coffee."

This particular sample of Original Blend exhibited an almost academically thorough anthology of coffee taints and shadow defects. Some cups were flat and musty, others seemed additionally green and astringent, and some were rich with a rather pleasant apricot-toned sweet ferment (perhaps what nominating reader Des Cabigan cited as "a sniff of oranges"). But not a single cup appeared on the table without some taint or other. Presumably the several nominating readers based their emails on a better iteration of the Original Blend than this one, something closer to the version to which I gave an 87 rating in 2002.