Borders' Seattle Blend (?)

I don't know what the provenance of this blend is, I don't even remember the name they gave it. It was "something Blend," I'm pretty sure.

Borders Bookstore's Seattle Blend
Drip Coffee,
Delivery: Insulated Drainer-pots with little timers on them


I got the first cup out of the drainer. I did not notice if they reset the timer on it, but I did notice that there were timers.

This tastes like 1989. It is clean tasting and wide-ranging, with no sediment and little mid-range. It sounds like David Wm. Sims' bass playing as opposed to Dave Reilly's or Mike Watt's. Nice bass, and lots of high end, and the playing is kind of tight. It is "roasty," but not annoyingly so. You get some smoke, but without the bitterness that accompanies over-doing it, such as every coffee that Ed Dunn has ever roasted has.

There is a slight wiff of cold air in it, I mean that back-end flavor of cold that you get sometimes in goat meat.

As much as it pains me to say it, I detected a hint of sweet cherry in there, subtle and somewhere in the middle. I'm not talking about that shit they use to flavor coffee, but something inherent in the beans themselves. Almost as if it had been aged in cherry barrels. I didn't notice it until the fourth sip or so, and as I said it was fairly subtle, but definitely there, and I feel pretty sure that I have never tasted this taste in coffee before. Never.

If I had to give this coffee a color, it would be brown, and as neutral a brown as possible, not really tending toward either red or green.

This is a moderately high-caffeine coffee. By the fourth sip I had a couple headache pangs, top front.

I just noticed that the side of the cup boasts "Smooth-Roasted." That seems apt.