Caribbean Reviews

Distinct dark chocolate, cedar, roasted nut, raisin and a hint of lily-like flowers in aroma and cup. Soft, rounded acidity; silky mouthfeel. Sweet and chocolaty though mildly astringent finish.

Balanced, sweetly crisp. Floral-toned peach and a tart, mandarin orange dominate, rounded by a backgrounded nut-toned chocolate. Brisk, sweet-toned acidity; silky mouthfeel. The chocolate suggestion carries into a clean finish.

In the aroma crisp walnut, fresh-cup wood, cardamom. In the cup syrupy body, distinct smoky and earthy notes with an underlying sweet candyish character: The whole package could be read as a sort of woodsy butterscotch. Sweet-toned finish.

Opens well: Very sweet-toned, deep aroma with a hint of mustiness that merely complicates a tight-knit, delicate complexity: cedar, semi-sweet chocolate, dry berry, orange. In the cup remains sweet, but the musty character dominates, narrowing the aromatics toward a sort of rough, cedary chocolate. Rather tight, salty finish.

Low-key, sweetly pungent aroma: pear, caramel, chocolate. In the cup rich, roundly full-bodied, with plum and chocolate notes. A slight astringent sharpness tends to shadow the lush aromatics, however, particularly in the finish.

Mid-toned and complex in the nose with fresh apricot and sweet cocoa. Simplifies slightly in the cup, turning roundly tart in a rich Meyer lemon direction. The immediate finish is slightly sharp, but the long finish smoothes out in a silky lemony, chocolaty trajectory.

Variants on citrus shimmer through this buoyant, sweetly acidy cup: lemon and cocoa in the aroma, lemon and pink grapefruit in the cup. The finish is sweetly tart.

Not your purist's Blue Mountain, but a fine, complex cup: rich, wine-like fruit, jasmine notes, and a hint of pleasantly rough mustiness that reads as a spicy chocolate

Full body and sweet, voluptuously rounded acidity. Low-toned, symphonically complex fruit suggests melon in aroma, spicy apricot in cup and finish. A slight hint of mustiness is coiled inside the richness, modestly lowering my rating of this otherwise classic Blue Mountain cup.

Hugely rich, big-bodied, low-toned. Roundly full apricot and peach notes in both aroma and cup. A slight hint of mustiness shadows aroma and finish, but the cup is grandly clean.

Smoky and richly heavy in its aromatics, but rather musty and monotoned in the cup. The musty tones, as they often do in Sumatras, hint at positive associations like spice and a sort of rough chocolate, but ultimately are too hard and unresilient to sustain too positive a reading.

Reader Ben Anderson finds this Blue Mountain "phenomenal," a "yardstickexample of the variety ... extremely complex and proportioned." Certainly a fine example of theBlue Mountain profile, far better than any production roast Blue Mountain I have cupped overthe past few years: balanced, with resonant, bell-toned dimension and classic fruit notes of pure essential coffee character.

Understated, barely felt dry tones animate a roundly balanced cup embellished by teasing hints of deep-toned fruit and a shimmer of flowers. In the rich, long finish the fruit modulates toward chocolate. As the coffee cools a slight flatness mars the profile, perhaps a drying fault. I evaluated this coffee mainly on the basis of its full, lovely balance when hot.

A clean, sweetly understated acidity complicated by a hint of flowers animates the bittersweetness of the dark roast. Ultimately the bitter tones dominate in finish, however, and intensify as the coffee cools.

Close to the great Blue Mountains of the past: balanced, round, very rich, almost bouillon-like, with a slight, spicy effervescence tickling at the heart of the cup. Regrettably, a faint, almost undetectable hardness or storage-related fading shadows the otherwise superb cup.

Alive with dry nuance and surprise: pruny fruit, crisp chocolate, sweetening slightly toward the finish. As the cup cools the chocolate sharpens a bit toward tobacco and herb. Long, richly dry aftertaste.

This coffee manifested some brightness and acidity in the cup, which probably accounted for a higher rating than one would expect given that several panelists complained of a background shadow or taint. I called the problem a "slight, high, hard fruitiness." Another cupper identified it as grassiness; another detected a "rubbery" taste; still another concluded the coffee was "faded." Not much consensus in those descriptions, but clearly something was off. Two of us noted that the profile tended to vary from cup to cup, with some cups bright with a floral or fruit-toned acidity, and some dulled by the elusive taint.

The majority of panelists dismissed this coffee as fermented, the flavor defect that results from the some of the beans picking up the rotten-fruit taste of fermenting sugars during processing or drying. "Trying to be constructive here but can't find any grounds for redemption," wrote one. However, three panelists were open to redemption, rating this coffee in the low 80s, perhaps reading the ferment tones as fruity or wine-like. Two of the three yea-sayers struggled with their ambivalence in their comments, finally coming down on the positive side of the fruit/ferment continuum. The matrix of sensation under and around the ferment definitely was full and complex.

Something was slightly off with this coffee. Two panelists mentioned ferment but I doubt it. One called the taint grassy; "slightly harsh & earthy" wrote another; I had it as "a touch of hard tobacco, herb." Whatever it was, it brought down the rating of this otherwise ingratiatingly sweet, rounded coffee with subtle grace notes variously described as chocolate, vanilla, and (the favorite) caramel.