Now this is a coffee to be reckoned with.

Dusky, smoky, it has a dark oak flavor with a nice sharp spike of acidity, with a hint of chocolate, and more powerfully, caramel.  It leaves the palate with a almost citrusy tanginess.

This is a bold gourmet "wake-up!" coffee if there ever was one.   This is a coffee to start the day when you have something extra-important that you have to be wide awake for, and you want to be sharp and in a good mood.

Yes, that is what this coffee is about.  Good, strong, delicious, important.

Buddy Brew roasts their coffees by hand in small batches, order by order, and sends them out in bags hand-labeled in pencil.  This is like having a good friend who knows how to roast coffee beans to perfection, and hands you a package of something extra special every week.  It’s not just business to them, it’s personal.  They love coffee.  They are entrusting it to you.

I’ll tell you what — that’s exactly how it should be.  If you just don’t have time to roast your own, find someone like these guys and get it from them.  It’s the only way.

It just is the only way.

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Kona Luna coffee in just two words:  Mellow and smooth.

I’m not a big fan of Kona beans, because in general they’re just too mellow for my own personal tastes.  But the beans Kona Luna sent are different, somehow.  I would almost say they’re bolder than I’d usually associate with standard Kona, but that’s not quite true.  Maybe it’s that they’re richer, but it’s hard to tell because the coffee is just so smooth, so laid back, it’s hard to pin that quality down.

You’d be hard pressed to find any kind of acidity in this coffee.  I did find a ghost of it but that’s only because I left it steeping longer than usual in my French press.  It’s gentle, relaxed, and mellow.  The taste is coffee, pure coffee, with a light lattice of pecan notes, and maybe — though this is probably just my imagination — a touch of coconut.

I haven’t been to Hawaii since I was 16.  At that point I was not yet a coffee drinker, so as far as the Kona beans go, the trip was lost on me.  I was more attuned to bikinis, surfing, snorkeling, and diving with whales (true story).  Also, since the drinking age there was only 18, and I easily passed for a 19 at the time, it was another entirely different type of "brew" on which I focused.

To sum up, if I were a fan of Kona, I’d be a huge fan of Kona Luna’s coffee.  And even though I’m not, I do like it quite a bit, and heartily recommend it to anyone who’s into the Hawaiian bean.

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"Wow!  Wow.  Oh my God."

This is my actual, unedited reaction to my first sip of this coffee.

Part of it was due to a bit of scalding of my tongue — the rest was a gut reaction to an incredible coffee flavor.

These beans from Buddy Brew Coffee were fired up only 4 days ago — the package features a hand-written date in pencil.  Done in small batches, these were hand-roasted to City +, cooled, bagged, packed in a Priority Mail envelope and sent out post-haste.  And here I am drinking it.

I haven’t had coffee this good in a long, long time.

It’s naturally sweet with very strong chocolate overtones, and a perfect balance of acidity — just enough there to sharpen the flavor, and that’s it.  The body is light, but the flavor is bold, washing across the palate and delivering a light, nutty aftertaste.

Instead of the winey acidic bite of Kenya AA roasts I’ve sampled in the past, this hits me more like an incredible chocolate-coffee liqueur.  I’m totally loving it, and I think the folks at Buddy Brew Coffee are my new favorite coffee roasters.

Look for more from them here over the next few weeks.  I have more beans on the way.

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"Dear father, do not be so strict!  If I can’t have my little demi-tasse of coffee three times a day, I’m just like a dried up piece of roast goat!  Ah!  How sweet coffee tastes!  Lovelier than a thousand kisses, sweeter far than muscatel wine!  I must have my coffee, and if anyone wishes to please me, let him present me with — coffee!"

"Oh, Daddy, don’t be such a drag," a modern librettist translates the cantata.  "If I don’t get my coffee fix three times a day, I’ll die!"

- Lifted from Uncommon Grounds By Mark Pendergrast

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Hi everyone. I’m still in Finland. After breakfast I went shopping to pick up some chocolate for my love, and stumbled across this. It’s not like I really need it — it’s more like I couldn’t resist. It looks like a perfect fit for my coffee carafe back home.

– Post From My iPhone

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You’re much more likely to run into a behemoth of a machine like this than a simple coffee pot. Also a tiny little six ounce cup runs about 2 euros — and in some places that does not come with refills.

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After about two months of some serious taste testing, I have to report my results.

Not only does a French Press make a better tasting cup of coffee than using a cone filter, but the taste is so much better that it makes the mess and extra clean up involved worth it.

There is an art to using a French Press, and rather than recreating the procedure from scratch, let me just point you in the right direction. Kaylee Wood at Acceptable Addiction has it all spelled out to the letter.  You can read the instructions on her site here:

French Press Coffee – Acceptable Addiction.

One thing I have found, though … if you just can’t abide by the sediment that will inevitably hang in the coffee coming from a French Press, you can always run it through a cup-top coffee filter.

But a little bit of coffee mud doesn’t hurt anything, and in fact, actually adds to the flavor.

From this point on, when I do a coffee review here, if it’s at all possible I will use a French Press to make the coffee.

(For the record, I still think a single-serving cup-top coffee maker is the second best way to make coffee.)

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I noticed construction on part of the local McDonalds, part of the front wrapped with plastic so that the business could be sealed off from what looked like after-hours renovation.  “That’s for the new McCafe,” I was told by the bright, cheery blond girl behind the counter.  “We’re going to compete with Starbucks!”

Interesting, I thought.  “Can’t wait to try it,” I told her.

Skip ahead a couple of months.  I go into the McDonalds and sure enough, over to the side of their regular food counter, is a new high-tech coffee device.  Signs are all over the store for their new cappuccino in various flavors.  This time, instead of the bright cheery girl at the counter, I get a bored, unhappy, slovenly girl about the size of a mouse on stilts.

“I’ll try one of your mocha cappucinos,” I tell her.

“Oh,” she says.  “Uh.”  She has to call a manager over to ask her which button to push on the register.  Then they and a couple of the other employees have a quick huddle, and a big guy with dull eyes and a slack jaw, he seems to have been elected against his will to be the one to have to deal with the new coffee machine.

He doesn’t look happy.  In fact, he looks frightened.

Shuffling up to the coffee machine, he flips open instructions printed in large type right at his eye level, glued to the front of the machine.  I sneak a peak at it — very small words outlining the process in simple steps with lots of pictures.  Pick up a cup.  Squirt flavor syrups in it.  Pour in something from bottle A.  Put it under nozzle.  Etc.

He goes through the steps slowly, acting as if he’s diffusing a bomb.  When the steam part happens, he’s very tense.  So is everyone else behind the counter.  I suspect a mishap with the machine sometime in the recent past is to blame, but, who knows.

He finishes the mocha cappuccino, or what passes for one at McDonalds, and hands it over with relief.  Then he hurries back over to the fry bins, which is where he would have rather have been in the first place.

I take my McDonalds mocha cappucino over to a table and sit down.

Is it going to be any good?  I have my doubts, but, I try to remain positive.  I take my first tentative sip.  Then another.  I sigh, let it sit for a bit, and take a third.

Am I surprised?

No.  I throw the rest of it away and leave.

Starbucks has nothing to worry about.

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