Blind Assessment: Briskly sweet-tart, fruit-forward. Dark chocolate, maraschino cherry, pipe tobacco, caramel, almond in aroma and cup. Bittersweet instructure with gentle, rounded acidity; full, syrupy mouthfeel. The drying, cocoa-toned finish leads with dark chocolate in the short with maraschino cherry resurfacing in the long.

Notes: This coffee tied for the third-highest rating in a cupping of coffees from Brazil for Coffee Review’s May 2018 tasting report. Produced entirely from trees of the Yellow Bourbon variety of Arabica by Celso Marcelino de Souza Junior on his small 5-hectare farm. A prize winner in the 2017 Carmo Best Cup competition hosted by importer Cafe Imports. A “natural” or dry-processed coffee, which means the beans or seeds were dried encased in the entire fruit. Naturals form the backbone of the Brazil coffee industry, but this lot reflects a particularly refined approach to the method. Big Creek Coffee Roasters is a small, quality-oriented batch roaster located in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley. Visit www.bigcreekcoffeeroasters.com or call 406-375-7508 for more information.

The Bottom Line : A crisply fruit-toned, lightly fermenty natural-processed Brazil cup.