I live near Theta Ridge and have found them to be a reliable source for green coffee beans - especially Brazils. So I keep my eye on their offerings. Recently I noticed they are offering a pretty good range of Dominican coffees. Has anyone here tried Dominicans? I checked Sweet Maria's and Thompson doesn't seem to have a good opinion of them. Or I should say, I think he finds them to be not noteworthy - just so so island coffee's. What do you think?

If you give them a call, or e-mail, they'll provide you with a price sheet. My experience with them is their prices are very attractive. And, they'll sell you whatever quantity you want. I toured their facility a few months ago and was very impressed.

Dominican coffee is an island coffee, similar to Jamaican, Haitian and Puerto Rican coffee. These are the original growing areas for Bourbon coffee, and ideally they develop a toasted almond and chocolate profile with very little acidity (a touch of cherry is the ideal).

Sadly, this doesn't happen all that often in any of these places, since various combinations of storm damage, poor picking and processing, and lousy shipping reduce the quality. I've been through various branded island coffees that prclaim their quality -- Yauco Selecto, Hiatian Bleu, Mavis Banks Blue Mountain -- and my impression has been moslty negative: same poorly prepped coffees, just with some branded gift wrap.

Italian roasters have a partcular fondness for these coffees and their importers still manage to get the good lots. Recently, the Puerto Rican coffee board has pushed to raise quality at the level of individual growers in a project that will eventually culminate with the top coffees being auctioned. I've had a change to follow the program for a few years, and it is getting close to the big leagues now.

Given this huge discrepanacy between potential and most actuality, I'd be in "definitely try, but don't expect to buy" mode on these coffees

I roasted the same four Dominican coffees as Eric last night and will be trying them this weekend.

Based on the number of defects in the greens, I wouldn't consider this specialty grade, it was a bit tedious to cull just 200 grams of each coffee, but the proof will be in the cup.

The Cibao Altura de Constanza peaberry offering had a significant number of pie shaped tri-beans, the result of having three ovoids form in the coffee cherry instead of the normal two, so the peaberry lot actually had a mix of peaberries (one seed per cherry), flat beans, and tri-beans. It was interesting to figure out what these were and I ended up culling them because they tend to slip through the grid of my Behmor roaster.



Like Eric, the peaberry lot slipped into second crack on me as once it had hit first crack it had enough momentum to keep going right into second. I apologize for the color of the beans from my camera phone.