Central America Reviews

Classic, clean, complete, elegantly powerful. The acidity sings rather than stings: It is bright yet full-toned and winy. The aftertaste is richly dry without sharpness.

Powerful yet smooth and sweetly balanced. The acidity is round and ripe. High-toned fruit -- pears perhaps -- deepen toward roasty dry prune and bittersweet chocolate in the finish.

Irrepressibly buoyant, superbly balanced. The acidity shimmers in the heart of a meadow of floral-toned sweetness. The aftertaste is clean, long, lavender. Exquisite, elegant, precious.

A light-bodied but complexly nuanced coffee: brightly acidy, floral toned, with fruit tones that hint at chocolate in aroma and aftertaste. Not quite enough sweetness to offset the roast-induced bitterness, however.

A classic Guatemala in the lighter, softer mode: floral, gently acidy, high-toned but deeply dimensioned. Flowers permeate even the slight bitterness of the roast. A coffee as pure, sweet-toned and brightly complex as a Guatemalan weaving.

Dry but not acidy, dominated by a pleasantly smoky-toned cocoa sensation that sweetens toward chocolate in the finish. As usual, the Swiss Water Process simultaneously deepens and dampens taste: The body is full but the flavor understated.

Metaphor fails. This is a coffee that refers to nothing except what it is: a superb coffee, grand yet elegant, dry yet sweet, balanced, full-bodied, complete.

Full yet majestically buoyant. The aroma soars with sweet nut notes, the cup glistens with fruit and flowers, the entire impression is gentle but enormous. The finish is aggressively dry but saved from astringency by rich cocoa tones.

Classic vanilla-nut aroma and a solid, authoritatively dry cup, bright but not brassy. Not a lot of nuance, but outstanding range and balance.

An unusual profile: sweet cedarish tones turn smokily chocolate in the finish. The chocolate sensation is superb: dry yet sweet, crisp and complex, lingering with husky richness in the aftertaste.

A full, rich, low-keyed cup. Stolid but not inert, with just enough acidity vibrating at the heart of the coffee to keep it lively.

The roast dominates the coffee, burning off sugars and turning the cup dryly pungent, full and hearty but not sweet. Crisp chocolate tones complicate the finish.

An almost symphonic coffee. Nuance stretches across the profile: floral notes at the top, winy, dry fruit in the middle, and a smoky pungency at bottom. Sweet, cedarish notes tend to dominate in aroma and aftertaste, but in the cup fruit and flowers upstage everything else.

A classic Latin-American cup, dominated by an austere, powerful, full-throated acidity. The big, acidy profile is both impressive and monolithic, complicated only by barely felt floral tones, a sort of deeply held essence of flowers.

A rich, rounded acidity dominates with unaffected clarity from aroma through aftertaste. A cup in which nuance is not so much absent as irrelevant to the cup's essential candor.

A gently bright coffee, sweet and alive with spice and smoke in the aroma and floral innuendo in the cup. The floral tones linger in the aftertaste. Just enough resonance and depth to maintain authority.

The powerful acidity is like a whack across the palate. It doesn't allow much else to make an impression, although some cups hinted at a nutty sweetness. Perhaps the robust, dominating acidity is pleasure enough.

The bright Latin-American profile is complicated in the aroma by dry, pungently roasty nut tones. The cup displays unusual vegetal tones that reach toward floral, but fall a bit short.

An exquisitely refined chocolate sensation dominates the profile. The chocolate is at its richest and sweetest in aroma, then turns pleasantly dry in the cup and lingers crisply in aftertaste. This may be a bit of a one-note coffee, but it's a very elegant note.

A promising coffee dried out in the roast. The slightly charred bittersweetness edges toward chocolate but doesn't quite make it. Any remaining nuance appears to have been burned off.