cannonfodder wrote:LOL, 3 year old decaf. If you ground up the burlap bad the coffee was shipped in, it would have tasted better.

It had a few surprises. The dry aroma of decaf is usually awful (something dead and dry, a corpse that's gone a bit past decomposing perhaps), and one mostly catches a whiff of this in the cup too. In my experience, this always got worse as the coffee staled, so when I did decaf, I'd roast a small batch every few days. This frozen stuff nearly didn't have that smell; in fact it didn't have much of any aroma or acidity at all. It didn't taste unpleasant, just generic dark caramel and roast; in other words, most of the taste was missing, like getting salt water instead of soup.

I have a feeling this may be the secret of robusta blends, both here and in Italy. Roast the heck out of the coffee, then let it stale a month. By then everything offensive has evaporated, and one is left with only generic coffee flavors.

Stuggi wrote:Not really, cause I dialed in my Pavoni using a "napolitan" roasted coffee, with high "premium" robusta, that was atleast several months old when I got it. I thought the charcoal flavor was a technique flaw on my part, turned out to be the coffee (that charcoal flavor was present in coffee made from drip brewer, french press, espresso, you name it.).

In the US, "Neapolitan roasted" is the trade name for charcoal. If I remember my chemistry right, that flavor will never evaporate. You could add some barley mash, distill it, and see if it tastes like an Orkney malt.