[excuse the rambling. my recommendation appears at the bottom...]
At the risk of slightly derailing this topic, I find this subject fascinating. First, taste is so subjective. And it's not just taste, but smell. If I crack a bottle and it smells perfume-like or chemically, it's done. Smell informs our taste and the battle is often lost at just smell.
Second, your equipment matters. A cig-alike with juice packaged in a mated carto will be mixed specifically to be used with that battery/carto. This is actually ideal. It ensures a uniform vape, since the guy mixing the juice knows exactly what equipment the vaper will be using. Of course, the lack of vapor production means less nicotine delivery and less satisfaction, which generally results in a poor conversion experience. As you expand your horizon with more advanced equipment, your experience with juice will change and evolve (I have found that 12 watts is a sweet spot for many of the juices I love and 12 watts is not something you can do on introductory equipment).
More to the point, the person mixing the juice is tasting and testing with a very specific rig. Probably not your rig... his coil(s), his wattage, all these things contribute to his experience and your experience may well be very different.
Third, your coil life will impact your experience with a specific juice. If your coil is near the end of it's life, flavor will be affected. If you are hitting a new coil, taste will be different (not necessarily purer either, many users appear to experience the taste of some cottons strongly. I find this weird as cotton, at least as used in the coils I use, is tasteless.)
Finally, how you vape directly impacts how you experience the flavor. I'll give you an example - When I vape, I don't inhale, so I prefer less airflow. When I pull the vapor into my mouth I purposefully move my tongue a bit and pull the vapor across my tongue's surface. This provides me with a flavorful, full experience. If I just pull the vapor into my mouth, without engaging my tongue a bit, after a few pulls, I experience bitterness. It's weird and I can't explain it, beyond the fact that using my tongue actively causes me to have a totally different experience. Without my tongue, I question the juice, the coil, etc. and vaping is not a good experience for me.
There are so many variables. Add to this that juice changes as it ages and this is a damn complex problem to tackle.
[coffee recommendation below]
With all that said, my favorite coffee juice is probably Wakonda from Nicoticket. It is undeniably a coffee juice. It doesn't slap you across the face with a coffee smell like many juices, but it is undeniably coffee as you pull it in and then exhale. I like it, but I'm a big coffee nut, so I tend to get my coffee taste from coffee. I can't comment on NT Creme Brûlée at the moment as a great creamy addition to a coffee juice. I've read that CB is best when steeped for several months and I have a bottle aging as we speak.
When I decided to move to vaping, I thought tobacco flavors were what I needed. I saw all these crazy yahoos talking about cream and custard and fruits and coffee and I rejected that out of hand. After several weeks and a dozen or so tobacco juices, I discovered that overt tobacco flavors were not what I wanted at all. It took me some time to come to terms with that, but the reality is that it's pretty damn hard to replicate the tobacco experience. The good news is there are a ton of amazing and flavorful experiences being created by a bunch of mixologist mad scientists as we speak.
[edited for spelling]