Sampling a few coffees
Put that burnt bitter sludge away, please!
Added on the 12th of November, 2025
Not all coffee is equal. Even when you have a range of top quality beans to pick from, your taste preferences are going to impact how you feel about each one.
A couple of weeks ago I bought a new coffee grinder, the Baratza Encore ESP. Last week I ordered a selection of five different single origin roasted beans, 120g of each, from Dear Green coffee roasters in Glasgow. Over the past few days I have been drinking a lot of coffee in order to assess the beans, fine tune the grinder settings and settle on a particular bean to order in larger quantities for my new regular.
Here are the beans and my opinions of them, listed in alphabetical order of the originating country. I will update this page should anything change, and I will try to remove dead links as, inevitably, not all the beans will be available all the time.
Brazil - Fazenda Pantano: Muted sweetness upfront with a good rich chocolate fudge body leaving a very pleasant aftertaste for some time after drinking.
Colombia - Sierra Nevada: Very sweet with almost no body to it. Drinkable and still better than most, but very disappointing for my palate.
Kenya - Priory Farm: Moderately sweet with a very pleasant fruity body.
Mexico - Naxo Loxa: Quite sweet with a fresh fruity body.
Peru - Hector Saavedra: Quite sweet with a body of fruit and flowers.
When it comes to cost the Mexican & Peruvian are the most expensive with the Colombian & Kenyan a fair bit less and the Brazilian a surprisingly low cost option these days.
Now here's the thing, the notes I've made on each coffee are very much for my own preferences and as such the cost has no real bearing on which I most enjoyed. Traditionally I have always leaned towards lighter roasts that would be described in terms of fruit or floral. Recently, and by that I mean since the last three or four times I've had COVID, I appear to be leaning towards those described in terms of chocolate or fudge. After my initial round of trying all the beans I went back to the Kenyan first and enjoyed it. Since then, each time I've gone to make coffee, I have grabbed the Brazilian. Automatically.
So, as much as I have enjoyed four of the five coffees and would be happy to drink any of them again, I have no doubt my next order will be for a larger quantity of the Brazilian. Once I've finished all the beans at my disposal, of course. While it is firmly in last place for my preferences, I will have no difficulty finishing off the Colombian, I just won't be eager for those cups.