Since Crio Bru was the one that served me the ad and their presentation looked a little more polished than the others, I ordered their Sample Starter Kit which includes 5 varieties:

• Nicaragua Medium Roast - "Dark and Chocolatey"

• Ghana French Roast - "Bold and Roasty"

• Ghana Light Roast - "Chocolatey and Smooth"

• Double Chocolate Flavored Light Roast - "Chocolatey and Chocolatey"

• Venezuela Medium Roast - "Rich Chocolate and Smooth"

They also have a Sampler Deluxe Kit that contains everything above, plus:

• Mocha Flavored Light Roast - "Taste of Coffee and Cacao without the Coffee"

• Uber Dark Spanish Roast - "Dark and Darkest"

• Ecuador French Roast - "Bright and Robust"

• Ecuador Light Roast - "Rich and Floral"

In addition, they have a number of limited edition and flavored varieties such as their Vanilla Light roast.

After ordering the 5-variety kit, their shipping time seemed to take a while, arriving about a week and a half after I first ordered it. My perception may be skewed by the speed of gargantuan online retailers these days, and it may have also been because I was really excited to try it out.

Initial Impressions

When it arrived, I was pleased to see that the bags, like shown on the website, were all high quality and even color coded.

I planned on making the Double Chocolate Light Roast in my wife's coffee maker, hoping that the years of coffee making wouldn't taint the end result too badly. That's what I did, and it had a familiar dark chocolate flavor, and smelled very chocolatey, more so than it tasted. I could also tell there was a slight coffee flavor to it, but to my untrained senses, really dark chocolate always shared a lot of similarity with coffee anyway.

The next day I had one of the Ghana varieties, which I think was the light roast. I was surprised and somewhat disappointed to find that it seemed to taste and smell nearly identical to the supposed Double Chocolate.

Over the next few days I was having two cups in the morning, mostly to try to see if I could taste any differences from one to the other. From starting to brew to being cool enough for me to drink meant that there was about 25 minutes in between cups. Honestly, they were all mostly tasting the same. Every so often I'd think that maybe I liked one slightly more than the others, but then the next time I had it, it just tasted the same.

After the first 4 or 5 days, I decided to try the tea infuser method. The only thing that was definitely different was that there was more sediment in the cup. As for the flavor, I wasn't sure if it was slightly less bitter or coffee-like, or if that was just my imagination.

Even though I wasn't sure that I was tasting any difference between the varieties, I was still enjoying them.

As I was nearing the end of at least 2 of the bags of Crio Bru, about 3 weeks after receiving it, I had set my sights on Choffy as the next brand to try, mainly because they had a pretty sizeable Ultimate Sampler Pack, which includes 8 varieties:

• Volta Medium Roast - "Rich chocolaty flavor"

• Volta Dark Roast - "Rich chocolaty and smoky"

• Volta French Roast - "Rich, mocha-like flavor"

• Ivory Coast Medium Roast - "Light chocolaty flavor with subtle grainy notes"

• Ivory Coast Dark Roast - "Light chocolaty flavor with earthy tones"

• Ivory Coast French Roast - "Medium-bodied, chocolaty with earthy tones and little smoky"

• Ecuador Dark Roast - "Robust, complex chocolaty tones"

• Ecuador French Roast - "Complex, robust & coffee-like"

I knew the Choffy bags were slightly smaller than the Crio Bru bags (3.5 oz vs. 4 oz) but breaking down the price per ounce, Choffy still comes out slightly cheaper than Crio Bru, by about 5 cents per ounce. This seems to be mostly true for their larger individual sizes as well, as long as I'm comparing against Crio Bru's base-priced roasts. Some are "premium", like their Double Chocolate or their limited edition roasts.

Upon ordering, I was very pleased with the speed of Choffy's shipping. Within 4 hours I received a notification that my order had shipped, which was both good and bad. The reason why it was bad was because I had forgotten to use the 31% off first-timer coupon, so I had emailed them and asked if they could apply it, or if they could cancel and recreate the order, but I hadn't heard anything before it shipped out. In fact, I didn't hear anything for almost 3 weeks, but it turned out they found my message in a spam filter, but they said I could apply it to my next order. C'est la vie. But on the up side, it shipped on a Friday, and it arrived the following Tuesday. Not bad.

Initial Impressions

As noted above in the Crio Bru section, theirs was the most polished presentation. The Choffy presentation was ok. Not bad, but not great. The Choffy sample bags are all plain white only the text to make them stand apart.

The first one I made was the Volta Medium Roast. And again, I was surprised and slightly disappointed to find that it pretty much tasted the same as the ones I'd gotten from Crio Bru. I had expected that maybe the bean origin or something would make a difference in the flavor, but I wasn't finding any yet. But as before, I still enjoyed it.

It was at this point that I decided that I needed to do side-by-side testing, sipping from two different cups within seconds of each other, in order to figure out if everything tasting the same was my imagination. And I was going to need a way to keep track of it.

And that, kids, is how websites are born.

On the same day as side-by-side round 5, I received a package in the mail. It was from Sam (Mr."chocolate chimney powder") with whom I recently shared my cocoa journey. In fact, the same weekend I ordered the Choffy sampler, I was going to be stopping at Ikea to pick up a small 13 oz french press, and Sam wanted one, too, and wanted me to keep him posted on my brewing cocoa findings. In return for the effort, he ordered the Anakin variety ("A shadow of the darkness to come. A mixture of sharp innocence and a hint of darker things to come.") of brewing cocoa from Chocolate Alchemy and had it sent directly to my house as a thank you.

When I opened the mailbox, even though it was sealed in at least 2 bags, and even though it was outdoors, the smell of coffee came wafting out. Removing it from the padded mailing bag and putting it into the pantry has caused the whole pantry to smell, to me, like coffee.

I'm slightly terrified, yet interested.

Initial Impressions

Dark.

Very dark.

"A shadow of the darkness to come"? No. It's already here and hiding, albeit somewhat poorly, in this bag.

I took a sip or two, and it just really screamed "coffee!!" at me. I knew drinking it like that I just wasn't going to enjoy it much, so I wound up adding a few tablespoons of vanilla almond milk.

Sweet. Baby. Jesus.

The end result is that it came out tasting reminiscent of toasted marshmallows! I was NOT expecting that, but it was friggin' delicious. I made a second cup immediately after finishing the first. Considering that I need to add the almond milk to it, this will probably be a weekend-only brew, but I'm ok with that.

Once I only had about 1 tablespoon of Anakin left, I knew I was going to need something else from Chocolate Alchemy. I will eventually get a big bag of it to have around, but I wanted to try some of the other varieties. I wound up ordering samples of:

• #7 The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul - "High, low, sharp and round. It's all here and in harmony...but in a haunting minor key."

• #8 Shadow's Silhouette - "This is right in the center. The Goldilocks zone if you will... like I had baking brownies in the oven."

• #9 Ancillary Darkness - "More nutty with a ton of chocolate and very little fruit... depth of flavor without any bitterness of some the darker roasts."

• #3 The Big O - "A frighteningly painstaking blend... outside my comfort zone. Bright and snappy and fruity."

His descriptions are a bit long, so I tried to pick out the pertinent parts.

Initial Impressions

Long Dark Tea Time is almost black. It's a much darker looking roast than the others. The smell of all of them together is heavy and very dark.