Blue Mountain is mostly enjoyed in Japan as a brew coffee.
It has a distinctive woody notes.
You don't get a lot of REAL BM coffee nowadays.
They had a bad harvest last year.
I prefer some crops from Mexico, which has some magical effect on texture due to it's oiliness. As well as the smoky notes from Costa Rican beans. The flowery Ethiopian beans are nice for me too.
Recently I made friend with an Indonesian coffee producer, who shared with me some rare good quality Sumatran beans. They are damn good too but good quality beans are rare due to their poorer expertise in growing coffee. It's improving very quickly though.
But my preference, won't be the preference of average Singaporeans/Malaysians as i don't drink espresso dark.
Don't get fooled by any unknown retailers who claim that they have huge amount of variety. Whether common grade or exotic beans. When a roaster purchase beans from legitimate sources, they buy in sacks of 60KG and they do have a best before date even when they are in green.
If the roaster claim they get in smaller packs, then good luck cause god knows when the coffee greens were produced or how honest is the distributing agent.
A lot of roasters in the market, pass off common beans and claim they are from XX source. This is a very very very common way of cheating.
Another very important thing is, a lot of newbie roasters can't or don't de-stone well. This is one of the key reasons why grinders failing much earlier than what they can actually last. I will avoid amateur roasting companies like crazy.
Roasting itself is a skill, you need very accurate temperature control and knows when to stop. In fact, there's more to it than just turning, heating & resting, there's a few techniques involved ( Which i haven't seen written in any books yet).
The only machines that can help one to roast well, are the very high end roasting big machines or the drum roasting method which i do at home. Those microwave/oven style roasters, don't make sense that they can roast well.
If you are a dark espresso drinker. Actually you don't need to get very expensive exotic beans. When it's dark, most of the profile will be burned out and the end result won't be very different from one another.
Or if you are actually a milk recipe drinker, then more to say, don't waste your money on exotic beans.
You can easily be convinced even with common beans, so don't waste too much money on expensive blends first until you mature.
Buy blends for a bouquet of aroma.
Don't avoid blends with Robusta, particularly if you are drinking milk recipes. Of course, don't drink pure Robusta.
Hope it helps