South America Reviews
We found 773 reviews for South America. The reviews below appear in reverse chronological order by review date. Older reviews may no longer accurately reflect current versions of the same coffee.
The World's Leading Coffee Guide
We found 773 reviews for South America. The reviews below appear in reverse chronological order by review date. Older reviews may no longer accurately reflect current versions of the same coffee.
In the small cup deeply sweet, with a heavy, buttery mouthfeel and carnal fruit tones: papaya, mango, bittersweet chocolate. Exceptional in milk: very sweet with chocolate-toned fruit of almost lyric lift and complexity balanced by a dry, authoritative finish.
A gently austere cup: balanced, lightly acidy, crisply and quietly complex: dried apricot, bittersweet chocolate, perhaps a twist of fresh-cut cedar. Softens and sweetens engagingly as it cools. Reader Maria Rueda from Washington, D.C. finds "It's the best coffee I've every tried!"
A vastly rich, balanced medium-dark roast, distinctly nuanced from nose to finish with a deep, bittersweet, raisin-toned chocolate. As is often the case with deeply fruit-toned coffees, some of the lush richness may derive from a fortuitous edge of sweet ferment.
In the nose intensely roasty and intensely alive with pungently sweet fruit - passion fruit, or sweet grapefruit. In the cup the powerful coupling of sweet fruit and bitterish roast tones persists. Patient palates may read a raisin-toned dark chocolate in the roasty fruit.
The aroma is subtly rich and crisp with dry cocoa tones. In the cup a sweetly balanced, delicately floral, cherry-toned coffee wants to emerge, but something is shadowing the profile, perhaps a very slight but flavor-dampening mildew.
Sweet, richly low-toned, luxuriously fruity, but distinctly musty. The mustiness is the almost effervescent kind that can be charitably read as spice. Cleans up a bit in a long, rather satisfying finish.
The authoritative aroma is dominated by low-toned fruit: apricot or papaya. In the cup the fruit brightens, lifts and intensifies, suggesting a tartly sweet temperate fruit like green apples. Light-to-medium-bodied but roundly smooth in mouthfeel; sweetly acidy.
A coffee in which a mild processing taint - sweet fermented fruit for Ken, a hint of mustiness for co-taster Willem Boot - turns toward chocolate under the influence of the dark roast. Subtle but substantial in milk: "lingering balance" in milk for Willem, "delicately complex" for Ken. Ken awarded this coffee a considerably higher rating (90) than did Willem (86), probably owing to Ken's openness to sweet, flirt-with-ferment coffees.
What coffee people call acidity, the dry yet sweet sensation characteristic of high-grown coffees, is the main event here: rich, dominating, toned by black-cherry fruit with a slight cabernet-like twist.
The rich, grapey, slightly fermented fruit taste Guatemalans call avinatado or winyness dominates the profile of this medium-dark-roasted blend, together with the intensely and fleetingly sweet innuendoes we associate with dusk flowers like jasmine or honeysuckle. The finish is sweet, almost juicy.
Crisp rather than bright, dry rather than acidy, bittersweet, cocoaish, elegant but limited. From a well-run farm in the relatively new growing region of Cerrado. Martinez Fine Coffees is known for its elegant packaging and respectful presentation of single-origin coffees.
Nicely balanced sweetness and chocolate-toned roast pungency, complicated by a touch of pruny fruit. A bit simple and monotoned, but pleasantly and deeply so, like good minimalist music.
Smooth, subtle, and above all, sweet. Buoyantly soft rather than bright or brisk, with sweet nut tones in the aroma and sweet chocolate in the finish.
Lots of praise for the fruity nose, but the cup failed to excite and the aftertaste disappointed. Overall, panelists found little to either condemn or admire. I felt the coffee had been cleanly processed but still emerged flat.
A promising coffee shadowed by inconsistency. The good cups: sweet, full, deep, but alive with a pleasing shimmer of acidity. The bad: full and sweet but monotoned, flat, with a disturbing hint of astringency in aftertaste.
This complex, fruity, softly intense coffee unleashed a torrent of description from the panel. On aroma: "sweet cocoa, dried cherries"; "very strong & fruity." Descriptions of acidity included sweet, floral, fruity. Body: buttery yet light. Cup: fruity, sweet, "strong honey notes, very nice, very different." The odd intensity of this coffee, arresting yet restrained, disturbed two panelists: "Some may call this coffee pleasingly complex, but I find it a little wild," declared one. Count me in the pleasingly complex camp. I loved this coffee.
A full though monotoned coffee with a fruity but rather inert sweetness. Two panelists suspected from the flat profile that the coffee was from last year 's crop ("Oldish; past crop?"). In fact, this is a current crop coffee. I also suspect storage problems of some kind: The "sourish undertone" that one cupper complained about tasted like bagginess to me, a fault that often comes from contact with moisture after processing.
"Inconsistent, dull sweetness," reported one cupper, which pretty much summed up consensus on this coffee, although a couple of panelists admired its soft fruit, peach-like tones. Three of us detected an outright defect, probably hard ferment.
I have to assume that our sample of this generally understated, rich, but rather inert coffee was dramatically inconsistent. I detected a teasing, off-again, on-again defect in my sample, probably hard ferment. I wasn 't alone: "dusty; something funky," wrote another. Others found their sample simply bland or "non-descript." Two admired their samples, however, responding positively to the round, rich promise of the clean upside of the profile.
A wildly inconsistent coffee. A taste defect, probably ferment, ran intermittently through the sample, popping up here and there with varying degrees of intensity, ruining a sweet, bright, nut-toned cup. Five panelists considered the defect sufficiently pervasive to dismiss the sample. Five more objected more generally, their complaints ranging from "rough" to "unrefined."