Caribbean Reviews
We found 48 reviews for Caribbean. The reviews below appear in reverse chronological order by review date. Older reviews may no longer accurately reflect current versions of the same coffee.
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.
Review Date: Dec 2011
Price: $15.95/16 ounces
Price: $15.95/16 ounces
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Comments on this coffee focused almost exclusively on the issue of roast: This particular sample was roasted considerably darker than the other samples in the cupping. This dark style, atypical for cupping purposes, was deliberate: The very experienced Coffee Review roaster concluded that this coffee came across best at a darker roast. However, six of eight panelists complained that the roast was too dark to permit fair evaluation. For this reason we are not publishing a rating for this coffee. The sample certainly was clean and free of defect. Whether it manifested enough power to stand up to a darker roast is another question.
A straightforward coffee, nicely balanced, clean and free of taint except (perhaps) a slight grassiness, a shadow note possibly encouraged by the rather light roast. Panelists noted nutty tones in the aroma and a hint of chocolate in the finish ("cocoa-like" specified one). Why wasn't this fundamentally centered, pleasant coffee not rated higher? Only one panelist registered enthusiasm. I suspect a lack of what some call power and I call dimension -- the sense of unnamed, resonant sensation opening behind the initial impression.
Judging by their comments, this Old Tavern Jamaica Blue Mountain peaberry was the clear favorite of the majority of the panelists, although they assigned slightly higher numbers for some cupping categories to the regular-bean Old Tavern also reviewed. Descriptions for this peaberry suggest a brightly yet sweetly acidy coffee, with floral high notes, full body, and good dimension. Some reviewers gushed ("Packs a punch! Love it"; "The nicest coffee of this Caribbean cupping. An outstanding flavor"); others simply approved or ho-hummed as they did with all of these coffees. I didn't pick up the hint of storage-related flatness that muted the regular-bean Old Tavern, although some reviewers did, groping to describe it with terms like "faded" and the like. I contributed some help to Alex Twyman, the farmer who developed the Old Tavern coffees, so my own assessment may be suspect, but on the basis of two rounds of rigorously blind cupping I agree strongly with the yea-sayers. I found this a clean, vibrant, subtly complete coffee.