Saka's positano would fit the bill nicely if cantina decides to carry it.

If you try malobar, it is imperative that you do not try it within 3 weeks of the roast date. It does some serious off gassing and is gross for the first 3 weeks after the roast date. Then it turns delicious after that. It's a bit of a Jekyll/Hyde thing.

ETA: while I do enjoy malobar, I do not consider it a Snickers bar type of coffee. I find it to have darker chocolate flavors with no caramel notes.

My wife and I both like Tin Lizzie from Vigilante Coffee in Hyattsville, MD very much every morning. They're pretty small but roast daily and ship quickly. They say it's medium-dark, but I think it's more on the medium side of that. It's full flavored and stands up well to milk as well. I think it's a great all-around.

Give Flying Monkey Blend from PTs a shot. I like my espresso sweet also, and find this fits the bill. https://www.ptscoffee.com/collections/b ... y-espresso

Alan wrote:My wife and I both like Tin Lizzie from Vigilante Coffee in Hyattsville, MD very much every morning. They're pretty small but roast daily and ship quickly. They say it's medium-dark, but I think it's more on the medium side of that. It's full flavored and stands up well to milk as well. I think it's a great all-around.

What flavors (notes) do you detect from this blend? Thanks.

We think it tastes like chocolate oranges, like those wrapped in foil that you whack to split apart. Low acidity and full body for us, but I imagine that varies somewhat with the grind and pull. I alternate between an EG-1 and Niche.

chanty 77 wrote:Since this is a medium dark roast, two questions, are the beans oily? Do you get much in the way of bitter/smoky flavors? Thanks.

I'm about 1/3 of the way through a 5lb bag of Wolf's Organic Espresso. It is a dark medium roast taken into 2C & does show oil. I'd say it's closer to a Southern Italian roast then Northern. I do enjoy it but you have to watch the temp & extraction to get around the bitter oily roast flavors in a straight shot. It's tasty but not a snickers bar shot.

Black Canyon Blend from BV Roasters can produce a Snickers Bar shot if they aren't roasting too dark these days. https://bvroastery.com/products/organic ... end-coffee

Alan wrote:We think it tastes like chocolate oranges, like those wrapped in foil that you whack to split apart. Low acidity and full body for us, but I imagine that varies somewhat with the grind and pull. I alternate between an EG-1 and Niche.

Sounds wonderful! Are the beans oily at all? Thanks.

Nope. OK, this is too much info for your thread, but I enjoyed doing it. These beans have been in the freezer for 8 days since roast. I pack into 18g doses in plastic centrifuge tubes as soon as I receive them and put them in the freezer. I take my morning doses out the night before to thaw.

Here are the beans before grinding a few min ago:



Here are the grounds dosed into the PF and stirred with a puck rake, but not distributed or tamped:



Here's a video of the extraction. It ain't perfect. I didn't spend as much time on the distribution as I maybe should have if I was intending to upload the video, but I used the Decent puck rake about 5 seconds, then an OCD tool, then the Decent tamp, and put a normcore screen on top of it. You can see that the extraction starts around the edges and then fills in and maybe a little bit of channeling at some point toward the end with the drop on the edge of the cup. Tastes good, though.
And here's the shot visualization. I grind for kind of long extractions all in with the Decent and have a bit lower temperature than some recommend. I like how it tastes. Total shot is 62 seconds. 20 seconds of pre-infusion and 42 seconds of espresso coming out.

https://visualizer.coffee/shots/c506614 ... 19f8ec08bb

Having recently gone through some Klatch WBC and Belle, I'd suggest the Belle is more like what the OP is asking for, but neither are very Snickers-like. I'm finishing up a batch of Dragonfly La Crema Dolce (Anyone notice a theme here?) and I'd suggest it as an excellent candidate. Very chocolate, caramel, and sweet. There is a nondescript and pleasant balancing acidity (enough to keep it from being boring, but not primary) and a slight, but reliable hint of cinnamon.
B&W Traditional is dark enough that it may be more like Redbird, which the OP waved off. Of B&W's 3 blends, the Natural was my fave. It had some Ethiopian fruit and chocolate, but it's not so light as to also be hard to pull. I found it flexible, balanced, and featured. The Classic, on the other hand, had a narrow sweet spot and was not super interesting to me.
Counter Culture Big Trouble, George Howell's Alchemy, and Wonderstate's Flyway are all reliable milky-chocolate with nut and caramel blends that I go back to over and over. Flyway is less well known, and I find it can convey a mouthfeel that makes it seem much darker than it is, with no hint of roast smoke, and it gets very butterscotchy when pulled well.
I had 17 ft and Hayes at the same time and can't remember their differences, but remember both liked pretty tight ratios (close to 1:1) and one was exceptionally fudgy, but both were that to a degree. That would suggest Gran Miscela Carmo which is very fudgy, though it has a hint of roast smoke--more than I'd care for in a daily driver, YMMV.

I love Hayes Valley and have been thinking about a daily driver for my new setup. Have you tried Peets Espresso Forte? Yeh it's Peets and it's dark and it's not snickers. But when I ran out of Hayes Valley recently I pulled some Espresso Forte and it felt like home.

Like Blue Bottle, Peets runs a very effective mail order operation and ships Espresso Forte for $18/lb.

Ruby Creamery seems very promising but I haven't dialed it in just yet. Ruby seems to have good mail-order game, too.

I'm very curious where you end up!