Grey roasting always delivers. After serving a fruity and piquant roast at our wedding earlier in the month, it was a pleasure to try this high quality light roast at EOS Coffee in Queen Street, Auckland. Grape is the main memory, and the coffee left me delightfully buoyed, its drinking momentarily taking me on a cruise in the harbour on a still day.

The initial whiff is evocative of a fruit bowl: sweet but rotund, with a smorgasbord of related flavours. Once it gets down the gullet, the same experience continues. This bean makes a wholesome brew that can be consumed without gumption or irritation. In a word, this is an everyday kind of driver, 'clean and sweet', that gets the body going as coffee should.

A round and very gentle feeling on the nose, but with a bite lurking a few seconds later. I over-extracted the first pourover, I think, as there is a bit of a bitter fizz after the inital burst of fruitiness. (The beans were roasted a little over a month ago, but they may need to sit a bit before getting really good.) It's certainly best to let the coffee cool.

Wholesome, not acidic, this roast tastes like a basic foundation from which to build. Two external opinions were: "woody" and "Umm… grapefruit"; which together summarize the basic feeling at stake that this coffee is something of the earth. My take would be that a cup of this is like a painting of a landscape, a sensuous rendering of a backdrop against which specific memories can find their way to the surface. If the sips start as snowfall on the teeth (sweet with a nutty inner), by the end they have become a beachy plain with scattered driftwood.

Silky is right; there is something very delicate and memorable about this roast. Best in a pourover via chemex (300ml/20g), with a 3 min 40 sec extraction. The bright wash of green apple is what greets (true to the tasting note), and the caramel and walnut is the bidding goodbye as is slithers down the throat.

A bakery and roastery in Bologna. The bread is very good, and this coffee is decent– which is more than one can say about many cafes in Italy.

The memory is not super fresh in my mind, but I remember the black tea / honey notes being pronounced.

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I had a very good decaf about a year ago from Stow, and so decided to try this one. It wasn't quite as good, but still very enjoyable.

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