Oak and Bond Scotch Coffee: the Gold standard of infused coffee One morning, like every morning, I went to wake my wife with a kiss, and in her sleepy demeanor, she asked if I had been day drinking. Most would be offended, but I knew where this hunch originated. I had just brewed some Oak and Bond Scotch coffee in an R2D2 French press. This interaction speaks volumes about the potency of this coffee. From what I gather from the package, the coffee is a single-origin Colombian bean. It is grown around 1800 meters above sea level (MASL). Which is average for most specialty coffees I have interacted with. Which means we are starting with a phenomenal base to age with. They get the flavors by aging an undisclosed amount of time in used barrels. The company first launched with a Bourbon barrel-aged coffee and now has scotch and wine-aged coffees. But first, let’s talk about the packaging it comes in. The canister mimics a canister in which you would find a bottle of whiskey. On the front, you find information about the coffee, including its growing altitude, how it was processed, and where it was roasted. Additionally, you also have tasting notes and how dark it was roasted. On the back, you have the company’s goals for the coffee, a brewing guide, and an expiration date written by hand. What is done so well here is it overtly looks like a whiskey canister but has subtle clues that it is coffee inside instead of whiskey. Onto the coffee tasting, as naturally that is what you all are here for. The coffee itself tastes like Islay alone. If you have no idea what that means, typical Islay-tasting notes are meat, sea salt, brininess, Peat moss, and iodine. It was consistent…

Peet’s Big Bang: a Tribute well done The Big Bang is a medium-roasted Ethiopian coffee. The coffee considered is a tribute roast to Alfred Peet, who was a world traveler and expert in the field if ever a man earned that title. His passport stamps include London, Indonesia, New Zealand, and the U.S.A. His company claims to have been the roots for starting and training the founders of Starbucks, Intelligentsia, and Stumptown Roasters. They have since acquired Intelligentsia and Stumptown. Alfred Peets’s main goal in staying in the U.S. and transitioning from importing coffee to starting a cafe was helping Americans appreciate better coffee, so he started in California and stayed. How do you pay tribute to the man who has impacted the coffee scene so richly? Well, it probably is not a consequence that the coffee used for this bag is from Ethiopia, the home of coffee. I think it is on the darker side of the medium scale towards a dark roast. It is roasted in California. I made it in a small pour-over and a French press, and here are my opinions. The pour-over was well-ordered and flavorful; the flavors were not trying to hurry over one another. Because this is a paper-filtered coffee, it had no oils present, and the presentation was a standard black. The notes were nutty, dark chocolate, and smokey. I would pair this with breakfast tacos, most likely from a BBQ house, or, on the other end, an Eclair or a Bavarian creme donut. For cigars, I would smoke Plascencia 149 or Punch Diablo because the spice and very bright cedar notes will pair nicely with the smokey and dark chocolate notes of the coffee. In the French press, the oils form atop the brew, covering the entire surface of the cup.…