EXPLORER, THE SEEKER

I return to North Carolina, and so I return to Wegmans! Though it’s not exactly a southern institution it’s an institution in my heart. They had the same coffees they did before, plus some new store brand cans which I couldn’t get because they had fancy things like vanilla and mocha in them. No good for this project! But since we’ve expanded our view of canned coffee out to black coffee too, I got three coffees that fall under our purview! This first is the midtier model in the Explorer range. They also had a decaf version and a very strong version, I believe 150 mg of caffeine or something extravagent like that.

Despite the cream color of this can (which doesn’t come across at all in my lighting, sorry!) This coffee is black and unsweetened. It also touts that it’s made with ‘swiss water,’ that is water imported from Switzerland. Or, maybe its made using the swiss water process? The can itself isn’t exactly clear so I went to their website for the scoop. The company seems to specialize in cold brew concentrate for use in cocktails and spirits, as indicated by their marketing strategy and the snazzy graphic design they use. I should’ve known design that good is for the benefit of bartenders! As for swiss water process, a bit more digging reveals that its a process of decaffination, used to take the cold brew concentrate down to reasonable levels of caffination for the layperson who doesn’t need three cups of coffee just to feel anything.

But how does this taste? Surprisingly, sort of sweet! The coffee itself is sort of sweet, must be the beans they’re using. The Back of the can states low acid, medium roast with notes of dried fruit and roasted nuts and I can see it. Theres only a pleasant bitterness, but not in that same dark chocolate way we saw out of BOSS blue can. It’s unoffensive, I fact quite pleasant. I’d seriously recommend getting a can of this, especially since they make versions with much more and much less caffeine than the one I’m tasting. Hopefully with their fancy decaffination process the flavor won’t be too changed between them!

FLAVOR SCORE-8/8

VALUE SCORE-5/8