When you step into McNulty's Tea & Coffee in the West Village, you feel as though you are stepping into another era of coffee, when specialty shops like this were the main purveyors of gourmet beans from around the world. In that respect, it reminds me of Empire Coffee or Porto Rico Importing Co. These business date to a time before the Web and radical transparency about everything from the type of bean to the name of the farmer to the altitude to the date and location of the roasting. The newest culinary coffee shops have fed the obsessiveness of many coffee fans, the type of people who want to know the precise temperature and pressure used to brew a cup of espresso.

I try not to be that guy, but it's getting harder.

Coffee Organic Peruvian French Roast

Purchased June 19 at McNulty's Tea & Coffee, 109 Christopher Street, Greenwich Village

In the cup Despite its prominence in Zagat ratings and elsewhere, I was not familiar with this shop when I stumbled upon it quite by chance a couple of weeks ago, on my way with my family to hear a friend read his flash fiction at the Path Cafe (also a neat little place; Christopher Street has a lot of them). I ordered a half pound of chocolate-covered peanuts -- delicious -- and a half-pound of this coffee.

McNulty's -- a retailer, not really a place to drink coffee -- seems to have steadfastly resisted the modern trend of sharing every little secret with its customers. The Web site makes much of its history (founded in 1895), the old time feel of the shop, the exotic mystery of imported products: "Immediately upon entering the shop, one’s senses are delighted by the many aromas of coffees and teas from around the world. Sacks of coffee and chests of tea with obscure markings from far away lands are visible everywhere. Even the bins, chests, and scales, with which these products are stored and handled, date back to the previous century."

The service was polite, if a bit distracted, and my impression was that more effort was devoted to displays of tea than coffee. My beans (and the chocolate-covered nuts) were weighed in the old-fashioned scale.

I inquired about the roaster and was told with a shrug that the shop used an unnamed roaster in Long Island City, Queens. Presumably the beans had been roasted recently.

Many coffee sellers now offer tasting notes as florid and adjective-rich as wine descriptions, but there was none of that at McNulty's. The country of origin was listed, and in some cases beans were described as organic or free trade. No details were offered about the specific growers. I didn't realize how hooked I have become on knowing this information, even though I am not an expert who can make useful judgments based on it.

This is in some respects just a difference in marketing. A place like McNulty's relies on the mystery and mystique of foreign lands. A roaster like Intelligentsia and shops Stumptown andCafe Grumpy appeal to a different type of consumer.

This type of customer is obsessed -- perhaps too much so -- with authenticity. For these consumers, coffee is no longer an exotic product arriving by ship from third-world places with unusual names. Knowing the details of origin improves the taste. Coffee is also a product with a politics, a mix of foreign policy, economics and environmentalism. Knowing something about how it arrived in the cup is important to some people.

So how was the Organic Peruvian French Roast? It was merely O.K. Maybe I picked the wrong bean. I've been drinking this as a regular Americano for the most part. Light in the mouth, maybe a bit of a citrus kick at the end, some bitterness, a trace of nuts -- hard to say for sure, I'm not a coffee taster. It was not captivating, but not overpowering, either. Just coffee. I guess I'm looking for something more interesting these days. Data.

I happened to find myself in a Whole Foods store a week ago and noticed the wide coffee selection. Not being able to help myself, I picked up some single-source beans from Ecuador. For much of the week, I have been drinking it, mostly as espresso, alternating with the pricier Kenyan beans from an indie shop that I wrote about last week as part ofmy ongoing coffee quest. This has kept me alert through a few hours of an extracurricular project, listening to the audiobook version of "Shantaram," by David Gregory McDonald, a potboiler set in India. (It was a MacBreak Weekly pick from Andy Ihnatko). Listening to fiction is harder work than nonfiction, and this book, though entertaining and well-narrated in many accents by the award-winning Humphrey Bower, stretches to 43 hours and 3 minutes (I'm in the third hour). Coffee is needed to get through it.

Name: Organic Ecuador Espindola

Origin: Procafeq cooperative in southern Ecuador

Roasted: March 8 by Allegro Coffee

Purchased: March 8 at Whole Foods Market, Chelsea.

Description: "Perfectly balanced and beautifully complex with aromatic notes of sweet marmalade, brown sugar, lavender and honey."

Tasting notes: Apart from the audiobook, my other cultural achievements this week were to Twitter far too much and get started on clearing the TiVo of "24," "Big Love," "Battlestar Galactica," and the Jon Stewart-Jim Cramer showdown. I also made it to the 45-minutes-too-long film "Watchmen. While I was at that, I missed a Tyra-Banks related melee in my own neighborhood at a hotel visible from our kitchen window.

So it was quite a week. A week that called for coffee. And despite excessive consumption of it, I still dozed off in the middle of Will Ferrell's Bush impression on HBO last night. But it's a new day, and time to actually log my impressions of this particular coffee.

It is rare to find an actual bargain at Whole Foods, so I was pleased by the price, which was cheaper than the prices for single-source culinary beans at local indie shops. I was also pleasantly surprised to see the roasting date was the same day I was in the Whole Foods. Maybe that was just luck. Usually there has been some kind of lag time, and I have come to decide that freshness does count. The coffee geeks on the Web seem to concede that Whole Foods does a good job with its roasting partners, including Allegro. Allegro's Web site does not offer the sort of idiosyncratic tasting notes I've come to enjoy from other roasters, it did supply some details:

Espindola is produced by the 311 members of the Procafeq cooperative, one of the five associations that make up Ecuador’s small southern coffee federation. The coffee plots are a blend of Typica, Bourbon, and Caturra varietals handpicked and wet milled on each farm, although one group of 15 families collectively mills their coffee cherry at a centralized mill. After milling, the beans are fully sun dried and rested before being sent to the Federation’s new dry mill in Catamaya for hulling, sorting, and quality evaluation.

For good measure, Allegro promises to donate $10,000 to help with irrigation projects this year. As noted here before, one important part of coffee marketing is to persuade the consumer that this is not just about enjoying good coffee, but also helping the local growers in an environmentally sound way. This marketing technique was practically invented by Whole Foods. So check that box.

Let's get down to business. This coffee certainly tasted fresh. But it was lacking in something. It was not particularly sweet, and I have spent much of the week searching for the sweet marmalade, brown sugar and other traces. It is a rather simple coffee, pleasant, smooth, no bitterness. I would almost say a bit of a sour apple finish if I knew anything about these things. The main experience is of a decent, ordinary cup of coffee or shot of espresso. Perhaps this is what Allegro means by "perfectly balanced." I would not by any means call it "beautifully complex." Not once during the week has it caused me to stop and wonder, "What was that? That was interesting." It has simply done the job. It transported me nowhere except out the door. I've come to expect something more unusual in coffee these days. I'll certainly try other Allegro beans, but when this is gone, I won't seek out this particular variety again.