Africa Reviews
We found 1998 reviews for Africa. The reviews below appear in reverse chronological order by review date. Older reviews may no longer accurately reflect current versions of the same coffee.
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We found 1998 reviews for Africa. The reviews below appear in reverse chronological order by review date. Older reviews may no longer accurately reflect current versions of the same coffee.
Intense, complex, yet balanced aroma: chocolate, caramel, cedar, flowers, tomato. In the cup the acidity is powerful but juicily sweet, the flavor alive with shifting hints of flowers, citrus and wine. Long, gently astringent finish.
A coffee at once voluptuous and austere. Delicately complex aroma: flowers, chocolate, tobacco leaf, lemon grass. In the cup an amazingly rich, wine-like acidity, sweet flowers, and a gently crisp, dry berry fruit. Hints of chocolate re-emerge in the cleanly long, almost perfect finish.
Vividly lively yet elegantly smooth coffee. Intense aroma with tart cherry and round, low-acid fruit notes, banana perhaps, with hints of fresh leather. In the cup sweet, lyric acidity, light but silky mouthfeel, cherry and cocoa notes. Rich, sweet, deeply long finish.
An intense coffee dominated from aroma through finish by a rich, tartly sweet acidity and high-toned lemon and dry berry notes. The finish, like the entire profile, is as deeply sweet as it is uncompromisingly dry.
Intense, lyrically sweet coffee: honey, flowers and the pure notes of coffee fruit carry from aroma to cup; the acidity is tart but caramelly, even buttery. Impeccably clean, delicately rich finish.
Powerful, sweet-toned aroma: cherry, honey, tea-rose, milk chocolate, with a very mild ferment that reads as delicate Riesling-like wine. In the cup the honey and rose-like floral notes persist lushly, with the fruit notes turning from dark cherry to a tarter coffee fruit. The felicitous ferment deepens, reading more as brandy than wine. The finish is rich and deep, with an attractive persistence of flower, cherry and honey, but is weighed by the astringent heaviness usual with even the best of this style of dry-processed coffee.
Pungent but sweet throughout the profile. In the aroma caramel, fruit-toned, slightly smoky cedar, orange. In the cup the pungent, smoky fruit notes read as a tartly sweet grapefruit, perhaps dry berry, with continuing undercurrents of caramel sweetness. Distinct orange notes resurface in the rich finish.
Delicately fruity aroma, sweet cherry with a hint of chocolate. In the cup sweet, rich, surprisingly full-bodied, with a dry, wine-toned black currant fruit and a slight burned undercurrent. Sweetly rich short finish, but a hint of burned astringency shadows the long. This was the highest rated of three Starbucks coffees nominated and reviewed for this article.
Elegantly high-toned aroma: lemon, peach, berry, a delicate hint of walnut. In the cup medium in body but silky in mouthfeel, with crisply sweet, delicately acidy dry berry and Meyer lemon notes. The finish hovers on the edge of astringency but stays on the rich, bracing side of the sensation.
The aroma is sweet-toned and intense: cedar, semi-sweet chocolate, raisins. In the cup, dry, spicy berry, grapefruit, Bordeaux-like wine notes. The flavor notes persist in the slightly but pleasantly astringent finish.
In the aroma this relatively light-roasted coffee is caramelly but smoky, with cherry and sweet pipe tobacco notes. In the cup it is delicate yet robust and very sweet, with a smoothly rich acidity, heavy body, and a giddy complexity anchored around wine and cherry tones with hints of smoke and milk chocolate. The finish is clean, long and sweet.
Everything explodes near the top of the profile in this intensely fragrant coffee. The aroma is rich with floral, sweet lemon and lush chocolate notes. Exhilarating floral tones dominate the cup, but to simply call them floral understates their complexity: This is a whole symphonic garden of flowers. The body is light but the impression and mouthfeel delicate and buoyant. Only the very slightest astringency in the finish mars this exceptional coffee.
A tribute to the upside of slightly fermented fruit tones in coffee. Sweet and completely free of bitterness or saltiness, the ferment comes across as sweetly orange-toned in the aroma with a crisp hint of cedar, in the cup as a lushly ripe papaya- and peach-toned fruitiness that leans toward chocolate but never quite surrenders its tropical juiciness.
Low-toned fruit (peach?), semi-sweet chocolate and fresh-cut cedar notes in the aroma. The cup is delicate but lush, enlivened by a softly tart acidity and complicated by continued fruit (cherry, peach) and semi-sweet chocolate notes. The finish is simple but sweetly clean.
A low-toned but deceptively lyric coffee. Rich in both aroma and cup: in aroma pear, caramel, and hints of flowers and cinnamon; in cup caramel, yellow fruit (peach?) and chocolate with hints of flowers and dry berry. The finish is agreeably chocolate-toned, particularly as the cup cools, although slightly heavy.
A simple but refreshing coffee: rather high-toned, delicate in body, gently acidy, with coffee fruit that reads as cherry with a sweet-pipe-tobacco twist. The finish is rich, clean, and surprisingly long.
Sweetly high-toned and delicate, this melodic coffee makes up in nuanced top notes what it may lack in force. The exquisite aroma is complexly and sweetly citrusy - Meyer lemon, pink grapefruit - with a shimmer of roses. The sweet citrus notes carry into the cup, joined by crisp dry berry and black currant.
The roast takes equal place with the coffee in the success of this darker roasted Yirgacheffe, proving, in co-cupper Christy Thorns' (91) words, "the amazing roasting range that a fine Ethiopian coffee can withstand." Christy finds "stone fruit, licorice, black pepper, citrus, rose petal and lavender" in the aroma and cup. Ken (90) also admired the rich floral and sweet citrus character.
Ken (91) admired this coffee a bit more than co-cupper Christy Thorns (88), who praised its "gentle grapefruit-like acidity and a nicely rounded, sweet and berry finish" but didn't carry on about it much. For his part, Ken particularly admired this coffee's citrus-toned acidity, which he found sweet, rounded, and "profoundly rich and cleanly and elegantly wine-like."
Although co-cupper Christy Thorns (87) felt the Ethiopia citrus and floral notes turned "somewhat passive" under the impact of the roast, she praised the "complex aromatics of ginger, clove and toasted grain" and a spicy finish. Ken also found spice notes also in the aroma (black pepper, clove), but particularly admired the cup for its round mouthfeel and "juicy and sweet but vegetal" character, "a bit like biting into a ripe plum and tasting the skin and the flesh at the same time." What we can take away from all of this is a coffee with less floral and citrus character than a classic wet-processed Ethiopia, but with more spice and tingle.