Tiger, Tiger, Waking Bright

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

This is a review of King Harv’s Bengal Tiger High Caffeine coffee.

*Full disclosure: King Harv’s Imperial coffees sends me coffee now and then. They don’t require (or even hint) I should review them in return. My guess is they send them to e in hopes it will fuel writing.

I, on the other hand, feel obliged to do a review of my favorites in hopes they’ll roast some more excellent coffee. – SAH*

It is a little known fact that when William Blake penned:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forest of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Despite the odd spelling, he was talking about King Harv’s Bengal Tiger coffee. You see, he’d built a time machine in a fit of romantic inspiration, and managed to travel in time to acquire King Harv’s Bengal Tiger. However, on his return the machine broke.

Since he’s not built it according to rational principles but only poetic inspiration, he could not build it again.

Instead, he was forced to remember it only, through long nights when he’d rather be working, but found himself asleep.

Ahem……

Come with me, through these lovely spring woods. We’ll hike until we come to a log cabin. You can smell that inside it someone is baking bread, but you’re not ready to face people. Instead, you sit down on a fallen log and open your bag of homemade trail mix, heavy on premium dark chocolate, fresh toasted pecans and Brazil nuts, and chunks of date and fig.

This is the sense of King Harv’s Bengal coffee, that mix of tastes and smells, and the sense of coming home, tired after a long walk, only to be revived by the marvelous extra jolt of caffeine.

It has scents of chocolate and oak, with notes of date and fig.

If you drink it neat, you’ll experience early intense notes of fresh brown bread and damp weathered wood, growing in intensity in the aftertaste. There’s also faint nut flavor most similar to Brazil nut and a faint note of tawny port, which may be the dried fruit and wood notes syncretizing.

Now add a little bit of cream. Cream only. Chocolate is now very prominent in the front, presenting not unlike a really high quality chocolate ice cream, giving way gradually to the woodier notes,and getting less sweet and more earthy as it evolves. Late arriving there’s a hint of red wine but still very buried in this preparation.

Now let’s try whole milk only. Aged wood– like the scent of walking into an old pub or a building with a lot of exposed wood beams. Then the nutty flavor distinguishes itself more as being similar to Brazil nut and blends into the prevailing wood flavor. What was probably the bread character now presents more like rich earth, with a faint scent of leaf mold and petrichor like the scent after a rain.

Sugar only makes the early flavor very reminiscent of aged wood. The late evolution briefly resolves into dried fruit, then settles back into aged wood. There is also s very, very faint floral note discernible in the background throughout the evolution.

Milk and sugar is probably the preparation that best balances the flavors of chocolate, aged fruit, and wood in my opinion, presenting as discrete notes in that order. The buried floral note was most prominent in this preparation for me, by which I mean it went from a 1/10 intensity to a 2/10.

With cream and sugar, depending on how heavily you lean into it it really reinforces the impression of chocolate ice cream. The wood flavor is still present but now the tanins are getting stepped on a little by the sugar, even if you use a light hand and take it JUST past the point where it’s perceptibly sweet as I did.

As expected the sugar brings the fruit notes more to the fore, with a flavor resembling sherry or another dessert wine presenting more prominently and earlier in the flavor profile. That said, at first blush I took this as part of the chocolate note, as the two blend into each other.

Iced, which is not my normal preparation, but since we’re getting towards summer and some people on the discord group were going on and on (and on) about iced coffee: iced brings out the wood flavor more intensely than any other preparation– really the only one of these where it presented as outright smoky. So if that’s your jam, go for it.

Favorite preparation: milk and sugar, but I’m biased as that’s my usual. However, I think it’s the preparation that shows off the widest range of flavors at once and rounds off the edges of the earthy flavors here without erasing them. Second favorite is a tie between cream only and milk only. The cream really gives a remarkably strong chocolate flavor. Milk only gives a somewhat more muted wood impression in comparison but I think it gives the best view into the earthy flavors and lets you resolve and appreciate their nuance best without any one becoming overpowering.

Fans of espresso and very dark coffee will want to try it on ice.

And while trying it, pity poor William Blake, stranded in his time, without another chance at the wonderful richness — and invaluable caffeine content — of King Harv’s Bengal Tiger.

Toast him with a cup as you go on your way.

45 thoughts on “Tiger, Tiger, Waking Bright”

  1. ”I’d like a King Harv’s Bengal Tiger High Caffeine, large, black please.”

    ”Of course sir. And sir, did you know your Tyger was aflame?”

    ”Yes, yes, he does that. No worries, my good man. It’s ethereal flame, so no need for that fellow with the fire extinguisher to be hiding there behind the draperies.”

    ”As you say, sir. James, you can go back to your duties. Sir, your coffee will be right out.”

    Liked by 1 person

  2. What about King Harv’s Chinese Dragon?

    What it doesn’t exist? It should. 🐲🐲🐲🐲🐲🐲🐲🐲🐲

    Liked by 1 person

  4. I woke up in the middle of the night and a thought occurred to me: WHY are such essential, civilization-sustaining tasks as cooking, cleaning, managing a household, raising children, spinning, weaving and sewing contemptuously dismissed as ‘menial’? If those jobs went undone, life would suck.

    These days, machines spin and weave thousands of times faster and some better than it could be done by hand, other machines help with cooking and cleaning, but they are still important.

    Could it be that, hundreds of years ago, men considered those jobs trivial? And today’s Leftroids unthinkingly absorbed that attitude? Hence their antagonism to any woman who dares to perform ‘womens work’. NO!! Bad Handmaid! You have to do the jobs men consider important!!

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Women took on jobs that could be done around small children or during pregnancy. It had to be work that could be picked up and put down without ruining it. So things like textile work (which largely fits these requirements) became, “women’s work.”

      Liked by 2 people

      2. “Women’s work expands as they agree to do it. An old book by Harry Frank tells of being on St Kitts in the Caribbean. It’s only importance at the time was as a ship coaling station. An endless procession of women would have a basket filled with coal, walk up the gangway balancing it on their head, receive a few cents, then dump it down the bunker chute, and return. He asked a large strong male native who was indolently reclining in the shade of a coal pile why he was not participating. “Coaling ship is woman’s work”.

        Liked by 1 person

      3. Yeah, I know all that, but why is ‘womens work’ dismissed as menial and demeaning? If those jobs are not done, and properly, life goes to hell. Who’d want to sit down to a lousy supper at the end of the day? Where will we be if the kids aren’t taken care of? Those are important jobs, and they’re not unskilled labor either. It’s just that men of bygone generations didn’t know to value them.

        So today’s left-wing ‘feminists’ are rebelling against Teh Patriarchy by…conforming to expectations established by men. Way to go!

        Liked by 1 person

  5. Dang, I need to drink…MUST drink…some of this coffee. It sounds amazing. I got used to the Starbucks roasting style where dark and overwhelmingly smoky is the baseline, so as delicious as the all the varieties were in the King Harv’s sampler were (a couple-three years ago now), most of them were lighter than I preferred. The darker King Harv’s roasts were superb, and this one sounds like it might be even superb-er. (Better start saving up my money.)

    Liked by 1 person

  6. Totally OT, but my beloved is probably spending the night in the hospital. He’s managed to catch pneumonia.

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        1. Keep his chest nice and warm. In my experience, hospitals don’t keep people’s chests and bodies warm enough, and they’re not passing out hot drinks either. So make them bring him lots of blankets, because they’ve got tons somewhere.

          Sadly I bet you don’t get heating pads or electric blankets. I’m a big believer in those things when I’ve got gunk.

          Do you know how to clap gunk out of his lungs? The cupped hand thing on the back that respiratory techs do? You can do that a lot. Get that gunk out.

          Lots of Vicks on his chest, throat, and under the nose. Warm socks. And it doesn’t hurt to have Vicks on somebody’s feet under the warm socks, either. I have no idea why it works, but it does seem to work.

          If you have access to the heat controls in the room, crank it up. Pneumonia is bad enough without freezing your guy’s tuchus off.

          I’ve had pneumonia and bronchitis enough times that I have a procedure.

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          1. I have found that making your hospital bed completely flat and laying on your stomach with a pillow or two under you stomach will really help drain the fluid out. Especially when following percussion treatments on the back to dislodge the gunk.

            And I don’t know why Vicks on the feet and chest works, but I agree it surely does help.

            And hot toddies are also helpful, but even the best hospitals don’t have them.🙂 That’s for when you get home.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Feet, I couldn’t say, but Vicks on the chest works on a similar principle to an onion poultice, by increasing blood flow and therefore raising the temperature of the chest.

              Liked by 1 person

    5. Saint Bernadine of Sienna is the patron Saint of respiratory illness. OFM, not OP, but we can forgive him that I suppose.

      All the best.

      Liked by 1 person

        1. Usually, their lives choose for them; the patron saint of archers, Saint Sebastian, was martyred by being shot with arrows.

          Liked by 1 person

        2. it’s said Bernadine had been cured of hoarseness and shortness of breath. On the other hand, he was fond of burning things. The first bonfire of the vanities in fact.

          Liked by 1 person

  7. I am … condemned to decaf.

    Caffeinated anything makes my blood pressure spike unpleasantly.

    So would the unexpected appearance of a Tyger in my vicinity. Gully Foyle I am not.

    Liked by 1 person

  8. I’ve been drinking coffee since age four, and since the time I spent as a Hunan being, my palate has all the sophistication and nuance of an Amy Schumer monologue, but this still sounds like The Coffee The Lord Made. Need to try.

    Liked by 1 person

  9. In my childhood I was my parents’ automatic coffee machine. I tended to wake up before 6 AM. They needed for me to have something to do constructively whist they slowly rose and shook off the AM hangover. They were both retired Navy. Their taste in coffee was hot and strong. Maxwell House. I was trained to not only open a fresh can as needed (remember the key you turned around to remove a strip of metal to open the top?) but to put at least two tablespoons per cup into the percolator. This I did with punctual regularity. My experimental attempts to sneak a small cup or two turned me off to coffee for decades. I mean, if you put a spoon in a cup it would slowly fall to the side…

    My wife is very partial to coffee in AM but she does have a nice automatic machine which she refuses to use the timer for, so I get to push the ON button when I hear her stirring. Shades of my childhood. I am not allowed to measure the grinds. She has experienced my Dad’s coffee before he passed on.

    Anyway, I have avoided Kahlua, which she also favors. But I finally purchased a bottle of Cazadores coffee liquor, which intrigued me with a Tequila base. Mixed with some chocolate liquor it is indeed fine enough for my palate.

    I bought some of the described whole beans a while back for my spouse, but they were just a bit strong for her taste. I did enjoy reading your treatise however.

    Liked by 1 person

  11. I was taught to drink (heavily adulterated) coffee as a wee preschooler by my maternal grandmother, who wanted to forestall any chance of my attaining my Scottish father’s 6′ height and thus becoming (in her view) thoroughly unmarriageable. Women, as any good deep-southern Cherokee Mamaw will tell you, should be demure and teensy. I am 5’2″ and not demure, but I now own a 26-ounce MONSTAH of a beautiful cobalt-blue coffee mug.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I was taught to drink plain coffee, with sugar, as a toddler by a mom who believed I was allergic to milk. (no, you don’t want to know. no, I’m not.)
      What it did was fix a raging case of ADHD enough for me to get through school.
      I think I need a larger dose, again!

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      1. What it did was fix a raging case of ADHD enough for me to get through school.

        Through life, in my case. Iced tea and diet Mountain Dew replaced my blood a long time ago.

        Liked by 1 person

    1. When I was very young, I sipped my maternal grandfather’s coffee. Cajun coffee, made stronger for aging tastebuds.

      It was 30 years before I touched the stuff again. It smelled wonderful, but was so bitter!!!

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    3. Parents and grandparents drank coffee like it was going to disappear overnight. Addicted. I too tried it in HS, meh. Didn’t touch it again until after college, about age 24 or 25. Late one night. Only thing to hold was hot coffee. One offering put in 1/2 & 1/2. Okay. That’s me. Won’t drink it with out 1/2 & 1/2, real stuff not imitation flavorings or powder, otherwise I won’t touch it. For awhile, which can’t get now, I would drink International Coffee™️Cafe Franse (sp), which was great for camping and backpacking. Now I think I’d find the latter too sweet. FYI, with the 1/2 & 1/2 hubby asks me if “would you like some coffee with your cream?” because of the number of little pods I use at restaurants (not quite that bad).

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