Ink Review: Robert Oster Signature Caffe Crema

[Chrissy]

Robert Oster Signature Caffe Crema ink is a nicely coloured “white coffee” shade of yellow/brown ink. It’s not a saturated ink and exhibited some very nice shading.

I found it an unusual and slightly different shade to several inks in my collection that at first looked the same, but were not. The similar inks were all a bit more red than Caffe Crema.

Caffe Crema flowed very well through my pens and it felt very smoothly lubricated when writing across the page. I found it a well-behaved ink and it dried fairly quickly.

I didn’t notice any skips or hard starts when I put the uncapped pen down to do swab tests, dry times and water resistance. Nor did I see any feathering on the papers I wrote on.

Robert Oster inks come in 50ml clear plastic bottles that are quite tall making it easy to fill fountain pens from, but they are quite easy to tip over so I usually place mine in a wide, squat, glass pot when I open it. They have good identification labels on the tops of their bottles making it easy to pick out the one you want when they are grouped together.

Caffe Crema is one Robert Oster ink I would choose to have a bottle of.

The Writing Desk kindly supplied my sample for review although a very good friend has also kindly sent me a sample.

• Start-up: Immediate.
• Nib Dry-out: Not noticed.
• Nib Creep / “Crud”: Not seen.
• Show through/ Bleed through: Showed through slightly on some papers but I could still write on the reverse of all of them.
• Staining (pen): Not seen after several days - easy clean-up.
• Staining (hands): My hands were clean after one wash
• Clogging: Not seen.
• Water resistance: Not sold as waterproof and water resistance is very low.

R Oster Caffe Crema.jpg