We're brewing the last of the previous coffee from El Salvador today which means the new coffee will be hitting the shelves and the web site soon. This one is a natural Pacamara and based on discussions with my supplier apparently people find this one a challenge to roast, but really all it needs are techniques that were common among pre-third-wave roasters. As someone willing to steal roasting ideas from anybody, I didn't have a problem recognizing how to get what I wanted from this.
The medium roast is super juicy with a lot of the coffee fruit flavor coming out. Going lighter, this coffee expresses as overly citric, not especially well balanced, and can easily end up having a drying effect on the mouth, which is not a particularly nice quality for a beverage to have. People who are overly sensitive to ferment flavors should avoid the medium roast as it's the sort of flavor that's wonderful, but rightly causes deep skepticism if encountered on a pre-ship sample.
I have a roasting class coming up in a couple weeks and this is an interesting enough coffee that I think I'm going to try to use it there.
As for the dark roast, this is one of the lighter dark roasts and I'm pushing it fast enough to get to the high temperatures needed to get the dry distillation notes that dark roast drinkers are looking for while also preserving some of that fruitiness (moving it more to the aftertaste) and sweetness that I like about the coffee. That combination brings a complexity to the flavor often missing from dark roast coffees, making it an excellent gateway to the dark side.