Casi Cielo! (Flamenco Style Coffee)

      In my last post, I talked about a lighter roast of coffee called Veranda. I feel bad starting out with such an awful coffee that I have decided to jump to something amazing and awesome in order to make up for it. So, without further ado, I present you with one of my favorite blends: Starbucks’ Casi Cielo.

    Casi Cielo is a wonderfully rich blend of beans. It originates from Guatemala and is claimed by Starbucks to be such a great coffee that they gave it a name which translates to “Almost heaven”. The description given by Starbucks states that Cielo will have undertones of lemon and dark cocoa. With this in mind, I sped over to the nearest grocery store and grabbed a bag of assorted Ghirardelli chocolates and began my exploration into this Spanish heaven contained in the coffee.

    While thinking about the origins of Cielo, I attempted to think of a good blend of music to go with the coffee. With the descriptions, the one thing that kept popping up in my mind was Antonio Banderas, a smooth, classy Spaniard who has the same appeal to the ladies (and some gentleman as well) as chocolate does. Lo and behold, there is a video of Mr. (er. I mean Sr) Banderas playing guitar from the movie "Once Upon A Time In Mexico". 

And thus began my first sip of “almost heaven.”

     The result was something along the lines of this.

My mind was blown. I loved it. I wanted the coffee materialize into a Spanish women so I could take her flamenco dancing to the music inspired by this tasting. It was indeed “almost heaven”. The combination of the Ghirardelli chocolates  added to the chocolate texture and as I continued to consume both the chocolate and the coffee simultaneously, I slowly fell in love with this dark, mysterious coffee from Guatemala.

Pop Coffee (Featuring Elvis, Nicki Minaj, and Carly Rae Jepsen!)

            With the introduction to this blog, I should sort of explain what is going to happen throughout the blog. I will be picking different types of coffee and finding a certain type of genre or specific song that seems to match the taste, smell, and experience of the coffee that is being consumed. This includes the way the coffee was produced, how it is prepared for consumption, the actual tasting, and how the environment around me affects me while I enjoy my cup of joe.

           Now for the fun part: MY FIRST PICK OF COFFEE!!!!! For this post, I thought I would be appropriate to choose an introductory sort of coffee. Something light, something that will appeal to the masses, so I picked Starbucks’ Vanilla Blonde Veranda Blend, a blend of coffee boasted by Starbucks to be a friendlier cup of coffee geared to those who don’t want their coffee to taste too strong. The description found on their website says that the blend is “a mellow blend with a soft and friendly disposition”  With the idea of the coffee being geared towards a wider public spectrum, I have decided to place this coffee in the Pop Coffee classification. It’s similar to Pop music in that it is meant for a larger audience. As for what type of pop music, I had to taste it to see just what kind of pop music this coffee is.

With the initial smell, Veranda gave off a pleasant vanilla aroma due to the vanilla syrup added. It’s pleasant, surprising to me because I thought it would smell like water, but it seems to combine the smell of coffee and vanilla relatively well. It’s as if Elvis is singing into my nostrils. I was ecstatic! This coffee was telling me it didn’t want to be tiger, cause tiger coffees are too rough and it didn’t want to a lion coffee because lion coffees are the one’s you love enough. It wanted to be my teddy bear coffee! How nice!

With that I took my first sip.

This sip was the end of Elvis. Rather, my taste buds were bombarded with sugary sweet vanilla water. There was almost no taste of the lemon smoothness in it whatsoever. I felt deceived! I was promised Elvis in a cup and got Carly Rae Jepsen! This, in my own opinion, is akin to thinking you’re getting candy and instead getting a serving of pickled pig’s feet. A bit drastic, but this was my immediate reaction. After the first sip, I thought, maybe I’m over reacting. Maybe the first sip is always this bad. I was wrong. The next sip seemed to be Nicki Minaj attacking my taste buds with her fake, plasticy syrup music. My thoughts were as follows: “Kill me. Please. This coffee should come with its own vial of poison…. Or a hatchet. I wish there was a train I could jump in front of to get this coat of sugar off of my tongue.” But, like a good researcher, I finished the cup with Nicki in one ear and Carly in the other.It was awful to say the least.

The one positive effect I can say I gained from this awful experience was the surprising amount of a energy I gained from it. Due to the minimal amount of time the bean is roasted, the caffeine content of a Blonde Roast cup of coffee is noticeably higher. Plus, the added sugar from the vanilla allowed for a nice sugar high. All-in-all, I probably shouldn’t be bashing the coffee/music as much as I did, but I couldn’t help it. The coffee did its job, but it was not a pleasant experience. Thus concluded my first recorded experience of coffee tasting combined with music; an unpleasant, but informative experience with Veranda blend and pop music.