Colombia and Brazil, washed and natural, put together for one job: to still taste like something after it hits milk. The notes are almond praline, chocolate and caramel with a hint of dried fruit, which is about as clear a statement of intent as a blend gets. Nothing in that list is going to get lost in a latte.

The name is doing real work. A seasonal blend means the beans in it change through the year as lots come and go, and the roaster's job is to keep it tasting the same anyway. That is harder than it sounds and it is the opposite of how a single origin works. You are not buying a specific farm here. You are buying a flavour someone has committed to holding steady.

It is built to work with nut milks as well as dairy, which is worth saying because plenty of blends sweet enough for cow's milk go thin and sour in oat. The praline and chocolate end of this one carries.

Straight up: this is a blend sitting in the single origin espresso slot. My Kingdom For A Horse do not make a single origin espresso, and rather than leave the slot empty or push a filter roast into a machine it was not roasted for, this is what goes out. It is the better coffee for the job.

It is built for people who drink espresso black and want fruit rather than chocolate. The Kenyan from Kirinyaga does the top end. Washed Kenyans are the loudest, most blackcurrant-forward coffees going, and Kirinyaga is one of the regions that built that reputation. On its own through a machine it can be too much, all acid and no floor.

The Colombian Tolima is the floor. It brings body and a caramel base for the Kenyan to sit on, so what lands is blackcurrant and sweet floral notes up top with chocolate and caramel holding it down. Pull it straight or as a long black. It will take a small milk drink, but you will lose most of what makes it worth having.

A named producer, which as always means the lot was kept separate from the mill onward instead of disappearing into a regional bulk, and that someone paid for the extra handling. Noralba Benítez farms at El Naranjo in Apia, Risaralda, and picked up a run of local and national awards between 2021 and 2023.

The processing is where this one gets specific. Cherries are hand-selected ripe, then fermented 24 to 36 hours in sealed containers before being depulped, washed, density-sorted and dried in the sun. Sealed fermentation is a controlled version of a step that used to just happen in an open tank and go however it went. Doing it closed, for a set window, is a way of aiming at a result rather than accepting one.

What it aims at here is clean rather than wild. The roaster's own word is classic and that is accurate. Citrus and red apple up front, then panela, which is unrefined cane sugar and the reason the finish tastes sweetened when it has not been, and caramel underneath. Castillo has a reputation as the sensible disease-resistant variety rather than the exciting one. This is a decent argument against that.

Cauca, around Popayán, decaffeinated with ethyl acetate. EA is a solvent, which sounds worse than it is. The compound occurs naturally in fruit, it is circulated through the green beans to bind the caffeine, and it takes about 99 per cent of it out. It is gentler on sweetness than the older industrial methods, and it is the reason good EA decafs stopped tasting like cardboard.

Popayán coffees tend towards medium acidity and medium body with a sweet chocolate finish, which is a useful starting point when a coffee is about to go through decaffeination and lose some of itself on the way. This one comes out sweet and rounded, on panela, dried date and chocolate.

Panela turns up here and in the El Naranjo, which is less a coincidence than a Colombian house style. The dried date is the giveaway that this has been roasted for espresso rather than filter. It takes milk and it holds up after dinner, which is the whole point of a decaf.