Happy Monday! Let’s start the week off with an espresso from new-to-me Canadian roaster, Detour Coffee Roasters. Slurp…
Purchase this coffee directly for $15.50/300g (10.5oz)
DETOUR COFFEE ROASTERS PUNCH BUGGY ESPRESSO
In June, I found myself in Montreal, Canada for an education conference and, you knowing me, I piggybacked some KC Coffee Geek exploration with that trip. My hotel was an easy walking distance from Tunnel Espresso, Café Myriade at Dominion Square and was only a block away from Melk Bar á Café, who had a nice selection of several Canadian coffee brands. I picked up a bag of Detour Coffee Roasters’ Punch Buggy Espresso while there and share my thoughts with you, dear readers!
A word about Detour first… they started in 2009 in Dundas, Ontario, which is just outside Hamilton, south of Toronto and west of Buffalo, NY and Niagara Falls. Founder Kaelin McCowan wanted to source great quality beans and roast them to perfection so people would fall in love with their morning coffee instead of just treating it as “mindless morning fuel.”[ref]https://detourcoffee.com/pages/press-kit[/ref] Detour roast on a Loring Kestrel, which is a machine that I keep seeing time and again lately. The Loring is a high-tech roaster that is also considered the greenest on the planet in terms of emissions, fuel usage, etc. Detour opened a cafe in Dundas in 2011, where they of course serve Detour coffee as well as bread from their sister company, Dear Grain. Something I learned from Detour’s website is their totally unique approach to their label art, inspired by Bauhaus artist, Josef Albors. Read more here about this complex labeling system that uses both shapes and colors, but Punch Buggy’s label uses squares, denoting “balance” and blue colors, which mean “nutty.”
Now, on to the coffee! Punch Buggy Espresso is one of Detour’s original coffees and they say it is the “perfect base for your milk drinks because of its bold profile.” I’m not much of a dairy man, so I drank this whole bag as straight espresso, but I imagine it plays well with milk if the roaster recommends it! I really like that Detour has a PDF file with more info for each coffee including origin info, more tasting notes and brewing and espresso recipes. The PDF I looked at has “July 3” in the name and I bought my bag of Punch Buggy in the second half of June, so that might mean the coffee I got isn’t the same as this one, although the tasting info matches what’s on the label, so I’ll try to find out and update this review when I do. Detour says this coffee is a blend of 75% Brazilian and 25% Colombian coffees, but the PDF file only details the Brazilian component, which is a washed Bourbon and Caturra mix from Gabriel Dias’s Cachoeira de Garma farm. This farm has been in the family since 1890 and it sits in São Paolo state, close to the border with Minas Gerais, where much of Brazil’s best specialty coffee is grown. Coffee grows around 1160masl and everything is done by hand at this farm, which has 165 hectares of land planted with coffee trees. Detour gives us tasting notes of, “Chocolate, subtle fruit, nutty” for this coffee. They recommend using a 20g basket with 20g in, 38g out in 28 seconds, aiming for a TDS of 9.5. I do not have a way to measure TDS, but this is a pretty standard recipe as I was hitting close to this with each shot without even knowing this info was available until I sat down to write this review. Most of my own shots were 19g in, and 32-34g out in 25-28 seconds, so I was coming in closer to a 1:1.7 ratio instead of the recommended 1:1.9 ratio. Coffee still tasted great, though!
For reference, my equipment is a Gaggia Classic tuned to about 9 bars of pressure and I used a Rancilio Rocky for my grinding duty for this coffee. I’ve replaced the aluminum screen holder with a brass aftermarket one, and the stock screen with a IMS precision screen. I’m using an aftermarket bottomless portafilter with a Decent Espresso precision 20g basket and matched 58.4mm tamper that is calibrated to 25lbs of tamp pressure.
For me, these shots were coming out chocolatey and with a lot of fruit, with less emphasis on the nuttiness Detour emphasizes in their material for this coffee. To me, this is a bright and lively coffee and my shots had a heavy, syrupy mouthfeel with lots of tart cherry and chocolate notes. I did get some nougat notes but also a lot of lime acidity and a hint of bitterness I’d associate with lime peel, which balanced nicely with the rest of this cup. Despite being quite bright and, for my palate, fruit forward, this was a nicely balanced coffee and I looked forward to my morning shots every day! I really enjoyed this coffee and learning about Detour, who was a new-to-me roaster, and their approach to labeling, which I am totally fascinated with!
