York Coffee Emporium

Of our batch of York coffees this has been the best so far. Even in our caffetiere it comes out with a nice looking head on it. It really wants to make you dive straight in and make the kind of slurping noises you were always told were rude when you were a child. They claim on the packet that it tastes of wine and plums – well that’s a new one on us. Us Judges are not normally partial to putting any quantity of plums in our mouth – but in this case we’ll make an exception. Rather than plummy we’d describe this one as a bit tangy and lively. 8/10

This coffee from the York Coffee Emporium claims to be a strength 4 - but when we brewed it up it didn't really hit us that hard. Read our review here.

This is a mild tasting coffee – slightly flowery even. We're not sure where their whiff of tangerines came as mentioned on the packet - or what an earth a moccha hit is meant to be. We didn't get either of these. Our only real gripe with it is that we couldn’t really crank it up to the ball-crushing strength that we were after – no matter how many spoons we ladled into it, it remained as mellow as hell. This shouldn’t put you off though – if you’re a normal coffee drinker then you’ll surely love this stuff. A wholesome 7/10 from us.

The first thing we noticed with this one is the beans are big, dusty and hard as nails. A bit like the mother in law. Arf. By which we mean even though we ground these things to hell and back, there were still chunks floating around in our grinder. Still, we persevered and ground them to dust in the end. This coffee is a nice and light tasting one – it looks  light in the cup too. We did have a tendency to overdo it though just to try and wring a bit more taste out of it. But it didn’t really work – it hits a peak and then it tends to just overload on a metallic aftertaste. Even so, it’s still tasty and does have a bit of a twang – slightly citrus but not overkill.  It’s quirky enough to give to anyone and should raise a smile at your dinner party. 8/10

Our 150th coffee review and it comes from Nicaragua - which came to us directly from a roaster in York. The beans were still warm when we got them. Here's our review...

There’s not much in there – it’s a light weight pack and we only got 8 cups from it. Mainly because this feels like a very lightly roasted coffee – when we mixed this up with four spoons, the flavour was buried beneath the taste of water. So we had to crank it right up to five heaped spoons – which is the level this one needs. At that point though it suffers a little from a metallic after taste. The flavour’s generally  good though – quite caramel like and not over powering -  So, overall it’s nice enough but a bit of a fiddle to make it right – and you won’t get many attempts with such a small dosage in the pack. I've not had a dose this small since that night with Little Jimmy Cranky. (7/10)