Coffees from the Pacific tend to be some of my favorites, as they tend to make wonderfully complex and smooth dark roast coffees. I didn’t hesitate to try the Starbucks Reserve Blue Java Indonesia when my store got it in – but I did wait until I had tried it a few times before giving it a review here. The reason is that I was actually quite surprised by this coffee and it took a little bit of time for it to grow on me. This isn’t because I didn’t care for it, but because I found it to be a little unusual for a coffee from the South Pacific. While you definitely get some of the richness that I expect to find in a coffee from, say Sumatra, this particular coffee is a little lighter in flavor and quite complex. It didn’t have any of the red berry notes that I look for in Sumatran coffees. Instead, I got a lot of herb flavors from this coffee, including fresh sage and juniper, as well as a little cedar and some dry earth tones (which I usually just call “dirt,” though I certainly don’t mean that in a negative way!).

I liked it from the start, but I liked it even more once I had had it a few times. Those sage notes make this a brilliant coffee to pair with savory breakfast foods (and snacks, if you indulge in a second cup of coffee in the afternoons) and it is complex enough to keep it interesting. I also found that this made a surprisingly good iced coffee, since its lighter feel made it very refreshing when brewed cold.

Starbucks new Blonde Roast coffees are lighter and brighter than any blends that the coffee chain has offered before, designed to appeal to customers looking for a simpler and friendlier cup of coffee. This is a move that other coffee makers, like Peet’s, are taking to appeal to other segments of coffee drinkers, as well. The Blonde Roasts include Veranda and Willow (also available in decaf), and I gave the Veranda a try at a recent coffee tasting. The Veranda is a very mild, bright coffee with a very clean finish. It is mildly acidic, and the flavor does not linger in your mouth once you’ve sipped it. It has a pleasantly grassy flavor to it, but it is not a particularly complex cup of coffee – although I will note that it is much more sweet and refined than your average “mild” coffee from a neighborhood diner.

The Veranda seems formulated do brew best in a drip coffee maker. I was also able to get a cup of it brewed from the Clover, which greatly improved it. The Clover-brewed Veranda was less grassy, much more full bodied and and a longer, more flavorful finish to it. The fullness imparted to the coffee by the Clover made it taste quite like Pike Place, although drip-brewed Pike was a bit more acidic than the Clover-brewed Veranda.

Long story short: this is a mild coffee that is great for drinkers who don’t love a strong coffee flavor (you know who you are!). It is not going to be your favorite if you, like me, prefer Sumatran coffees and other dark roasts. It’s a fine all purpose drip coffee, but get it from a Clover if you can.

As more and more brands come out with K-cups for Keurig coffee makers, there has been a huge increase in the quality of the coffee pods. That means that I actually look forward to trying new brands these days, where once I just hoped to get something that was tolerable (as opposed to good).

A new entry into the K-cup market is Starbucks and they have put several of their most popular blends – House, French Roast, Breakfast Blend, Pike Place, Cafe Verona and Sumatra – into these single-serve sizes to appeal to K-Cup users. I was hoping that they would do as good a job getting the flavors of their coffee into the K Cups as they had done with Via and I was pretty pleased with the results after trying both the House Blend and the French Roast.

The French Roast is dark and smokey, with an almost minerally note to it. It actually tastes more like the espresso roast to me, when compared to regular Starbucks brewed beans, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The darkness of the roast is definitely the best thing about the French Roast because so many k-cup brands (although they call their products “extra dark”) just don’t make their coffee strong enough. I end up stepping down the size of my brew to get a more flavorful cup of coffee (or just one that doesn’t taste watery) and you definitely don’t have to do that with the French Roast. If you like your coffee with cream and sugar, it will hold up to that well, too.

The House Blend was bright and smooth, with a little less character than the French Roast, but very well balanced. This one worked well at both my large and medium Keurig settings and stayed consistently good. Again, when I compared it to similar “medium” roasts from other brands, this one was fuller flavored and tasted a lot fresher than some of my comparisons (Caribou Coffee, for instance).

The downside here is that the Starbucks K Cups are more expensive than some other K cup brands and – of course – are more expensive than getting whole bean or ground coffee. The upside is that you get convenience for that price and get the same flavor as you do from the ground coffee that you can also buy at the market. And that means that these will go on my list of K-cups that I’d buy again.

My favorite coffee from Starbucks was a limited edition Aged Sumatra that was released back in 2008 (wow – time flies!). It was rich, smooth, dark and complex in the most perfect and memorable way. I like Sumatran coffee in general, but this was a real showstopper. As a result, I was very excited to see a new Starbucks Reserve at my local store, the Aged Sumatra Lot No. 593. This coffee is unique because it is one single lot of coffee. Much like wine from a single vineyard, it has its own quality and character that is different from similar coffees. With wine, when you work with a single vineyard, you can really learn the qualities that make that piece of earth unique (terroir) and it is no different from coffee – except that we don’t often see coffee treated like wine.

The coffee was dark and smooth, with a earthy, woodsy quality at its core. It had a slight sweetness and hints of anise, as well as a subtle cocoa note to it that rounded out all of those other flavors. It was absolutely nothing like that long-lost Aged Sumatra that I liked (except for the deep earthiness that I tend to find in most good Sumatran coffees), but it was excellent nonetheless. I also tried this coffee iced and it worked quite well, making a very rich cup of iced coffee that was both dark and satisfying, though I noted that some of the lighter anise notes were less noticeable over ice.

I have always been a big fan of Hawaiian coffees, because they typically have the richness and deep berry flavors of Sumatran and other south east Asian coffees with a smoothness that you don’t find anywhere else. So, naturally, I was excited to see a Hawaiian coffee enter the Starbucks Reserve lineup, Hawaii Ka’u. What I didn’t expect was how popular this coffee was (at least at my local store). Other Clover fans went nuts for this coffee and the store was sold out in just over a week! Fortunately, I was able to get a few tastes before it was gone (I even had two cups – one for me and one for a friend – from the very last bag in the store) – but I was unable to snap an interesting picture of the bag, so we’ll have to live with the stock image of the product.

The coffee promised to deliver a note of coconut and it didn’t let me down. It reminded me of an Almond Joy: dark chocolate, coconut and toasted almond. The coconut was subtle and mellow, and it didn’t stand out from the other flavors as a distinctly tropical note, just added a mellow sweetness to the other flavors in the coffee. There were no smoky or burned notes in this dark coffee, but the coffee had a very deep flavor and very, very smooth feel to it.I preferred it hot, but it also worked quite well over ice. It wasn’t as refreshing as some of the lighter coffees can be when served over ice, as it had a more substantial feel and was something to be sipped, not gulped on a hot day.

I think that this was one of the most expensive Reserve coffees that I’ve had to date. From that angle, it’s surprising that it sold out so fast. On the other hand, fans of Hawaiian coffee clearly knew that this was not one to miss. I’m staying hopeful that they bring this one back (even if I have to wait until next season).