• Beans: Charm City Blend, 16oz
  • Roaster: Zeke’s Coffee (Baltimore, MD)
  • Origin: Various
  • Roast level: Medium/dark (6/8)
  • Roast date: 4/20/2026
  • Purchase date: around 4/28/2026 from Green Valley Marketplace in Elkridge, MD
    Freeze date (partial bag): 4/30/2026; thaw date (batch 1): 5/27/2026; thaw date (batch 2): 6/20/2026
    First cup: 5/13/2026 (unfrozen); 5/27/2026 (frozen batch 1); 6/22/2026 (frozen batch 2); Last cup: 7/8/2026
  • Process: n/a (blend)
  • Tasting notes: none listed on bag
• AeroPress with JX grinder:
  • 18g coffee / 250g to 265g water (1:14 — 1:15)
  • JX: 16
  • Water at 95°C
  • Travel AeroPress Recipe with 45s bloom; steep until 02:45

This is what I like to call Zeke’s “kitchen sink” coffee. Here is what the web site says about it:

As a tribute to our beautifully diverse city, Charm City is a mix of various beans, each roasted for optimum flavor, and blended with an Italian roasted base and a variety of lightly roasted beans to create a very flavorful and surprisingly consistent coffee.

So, essentially, it’s a bunch of random beans roasted and thrown together, and likely to vary a lot from batch to batch. I bought this with the intent of brewing all (or almost all) of it at the office, so I froze all but about 4 cups’ worth in two medium-size mason jars. At 2 cups per week, I expect this will last me into August.

I last had Charm City Blend about two years ago, and for reference, I ended up at a coarse grind (JX 30), 90C water, and a very strong ratio of 1:12.5. I don’t remember much about how that bag tasted, so I can’t really compare the two. I can more easily compare this bag to a similar roast, Zeke’s BirdSong, which I just recently used up. I think the BirdSong is slightly better, but the two are very, very close in taste when brewed in the AeroPress with identical settings. We’ll see how it ages, but I think I’ll be happy with this as my office coffee for most of the summer.

6/27: I brought my second frozen jar with me on vacation, and brewed most of it there. I had my AeroPress and scale, but lacked an electric kettle, so I didn’t have precise control of the water temperature. For the first few cups, I boiled water in the microwave, bloomed just off the boil, and brewed 45 seconds off the boil. These cups had a burnt, ashy flavor. I also tried backing the grind off from my usual 16 to 18 (JX), which didn’t make much difference. Then, I went back to grind 16 and switched to using water from a Cuisinart coffee machine with a hot water system. The Cuisinart heats the water to some unspecified temperature that is pretty hot, but not quite boiling. That was a big improvement, but the best cups came when I reduced the ratio from 1:13.9 (250g/18g) to 1:14.3 (250g/17.5g). This seemed like just the right strength, and the cups tasted nice and roasty, with no burnt flavor. I’ve been brewing a cup a day for the past week, and only have enough left for 3 more cups, so I’ll be using these up a lot sooner than my initial prediction of August.