Castle & Cairn

Winslow Coffee Company is the "approachable" brand within the Cometeer family, operating as an in-house or partner brand. The Companion offers a more traditional cup as compared to light-roast or "third wave" profiles with their high acidity. Flavors are often more towards the chocolate or nutty end. If you are not familiar with Cometeer's process, they use a precision brew system to make a strong coffee, 400ish pounds of bean at a time, concentrate at roughly 10x final strength that is then flash frozen at -321 degrees. They typically work with Roasters individually to perfect the settings for each brew.  🌍 Origin:  Brazil Regional - Mogiana farms like Fazenda Matão and Três Barras 🔥 Roast Level:   Medium 🧪 Brew Method:  Cometeer Pod 👅 Flavor:  Little bit of cherry, roast, and dark chocolate. Does have more fruit than you'll get in some standard off-the-shelf.  I went with 5oz. of dilution on the pod and it is still a bit below my liking strength...

A property of spirits giant Brown-Forman, Woodford Reserve Distiller's Select (the standard Woodford offering) is one of the few remaining bourbons to use a triple-distillation process from its copper pot stills in Woodford County that is then batched with the more common column distilled spirit from the Shively campus in Louisville. Woodford acknowledges five sources of flavor : Grain, Water, Fermentation, Distillation, and Maturation and highlights how they differentiate at each point in the production process. Woodford ferments its mash for six days, a longer and slower process than most, allowing the formation of additional flavor compounds from its proprietary yeast strain, internally designated as 72B. They still use Small 7,500-gallon fermenters made of Cypress wood in lieu of more modern steel vessels, the porous wood also aiding in ester formation. This review is from a 50ml mini bottle so will not have the benefit of additional fine tuning sessions. 🛒 Sourced:  Free...

This ready-to-drink canned latte from Philadelphia coffee institution, La Colombe offers a sweet cold brew experience in a convenient package. La Colombe uses a in-can oxygen barrier to keep it fresh and Nitrous Oxide to help create a micro-foam head and silky texture. Marketed as a cleaner alternative to typical bottled coffee drinks, it has a simple ingredient list and uses sugar instead of corn syrup and real vanilla extract with around a third of the added sugar of the average RTD coffee. There is also added lactase to make it easier to digest for those with sensitivities to lactose (more recent iterations have gone lactose free). It comes in both 11oz. and 9oz. iterations both floating around $3-4.  🌍 Origin:  Single-origin Colombian beans 🔥 Roast Level:  Medium Roast. Specifically, they use their signature Espresso Roast profile (often associated with their Nizza blend characteristics). 🧪 Brew Method:  Cold-Pressed Espresso - The coffee is steeped as a cold ...

I recently have been working my way through a bottle of Blue Note Juke Joint  and enjoyed it's fruity profile but have had a tough time killing off the bottle due to a strange botanical off-note in the transition from palate to finish, somewhat reminiscent of vegetable clippings or fermenting tea. As has been my custom, I started absentmindedly dumping a few other bottles on my "death row" into it and a combination with a minority percentage of  Old Grand-Dad 114  seemed to be one of the better outcomes. A clear destination in mind, I recreated it in this 75/25 blend. How does it hold up? Vámonos! For the uninitiated, Whiskey Frankenstein is the practice of  whiskey blending at home  to create improved or interesting combos.  🧪Preparation I blended the two spirits in a 75/25 ratio to arrive at a 50ml sample, majority Blue Note. Final proof should be around 98.25. Whiskies were measured using a 100ml lab-quality graduated cylinder wielded with questionable ...