Good morning and welcome to today’s review! I’m checking out my first coffee from a new-to-me roaster, Howler Coffee Co. in Green Bay, Wisconsin. They sent me their signature blend and it’s time to run it through its paces, so thanks for joining me this morning!
Purchase this coffee directly for $15/12oz
Green Bay Press Gazette article
HOWLER COFFEE CO. BUCKSAW BLEND
I always love finding new coffee roasters and learning about how they got into coffee in the first place. Howler Coffee Co. is based in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and was founded in the summer of 2019 by Jackson Smith and Brad Van Laanen. The pair have worked together for 12 years doing CAD for a dental studio, making crowns and bridges and those sorts of things for the fine people of Green Bay. They drank a lot of coffee on the job and it was through this shared love of drinking coffee that they started to hatch a plan to roast their own. Like any good home roasters, it didn’t take long for them to share the coffees they were cooking up and soon, a brand was born! They roast in small batches and as you’d expect from any small side business, they are starting small and growing slow, but I hope for nothing but success for Jackson and Brad!
Howler sent me their Bucksaw Blend, which they say “is bold with a strong body; lots of chocolate and floral notes with a light citrus finish.” The website calls this a medium finish and for roast it says “blended light/dark” so I am assuming this is the same coffee roasted two ways and then blended after roasting. Unfortunately, Howler doesn’t have any geek notes on their site to tell us about origins and varieties and altitudes and all that stuff, but the label does say this coffee comes from Colombia. And on the topic of a label, I love the Howler logo and the orange label on a craft paper bag is an absolute classic combination for me. It’s a strong graphic, fun, has a bit of a retro vibe while still being modern and I love everything right down to the orange color choice! There is a ’60’s radio vibe to the overall look and I’m curious about how Howler got its name and aesthetic. If I could offer Howler any unsolicited advice it would be to put an “About Us” page on their site that explains who they are and where their name came from and bulk up the geekiness available for each coffee on the site. I know a lot, if not most, people don’t care about the same things I do, but it’s nice to have the option to dig into the details of the coffees if they are there.
I brewed this coffee with my normal pourover setup of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper with a Kalita 155 filter. I use a Knock Aergrind and I pulse pour my water through a Melodrip to minimize the agitation. This coffee got a 35 second bloom and the total brew time was about 3:45.
As I’m taking my sips, this is definitely a coffee, for me, to really let cool down. That’s true of every coffee, really, but some open up more than others and Bucksaw Blend gets better and better as it cools, losing most of its roasty, carbon notes that are more obvious right out of the dripper. This is a medium to medium+ bodied coffee for me. I’m getting caramel sweetness up front with a lot of fruity sweetness, like the sugariness of orange juice, for example. It has a very fruit juice-like component to the sweetness here. I’m surprised how much citrus is coming through this coffee, and I assume that’s from the lighter roast component of this blend. I’m mostly getting orange notes from this coffee, which are a good match for the bag’s label! In the aftertaste there’s still a lot of orange, but I’m getting hints of grapefruit, too, and if I let the aftertaste linger for a while there is a grapefruit pith sort of bitterness left on my palate that really emphasizes the grapefruit note. In the actual sip, though, I’m not reading grapefruit at all, this is mostly an orange bomb for my palate and it’s really nice. This coffee has a sweet finish and leaves just a hint of dryness on my palate. My first few sips at a warmer temperature had that carbony flavor of a light Vienna roast that reminds me a lot of that smell of a freshly sharpened woodcase pencil… that mix of graphite and wood that if you’re my age, was a smell you noticed all day, every day. Anyway, I get that with most darker roasts, and I don’t dislike it, but as this cup cooled that dissipated almost entirely. If I wait a couple minutes between sips I get a little of that residually on my palate.
This is a nice coffee and I’m really enjoying it as a pourover. It’s not super complex, but it has some nuances to explore, for sure. Most roasters make blends to create balanced coffees that are sweet and bright, but don’t lean too heavily in one direction. Blends like Bucksaw are intended to be daily drinkers and a consistent experience. This is a very citrusy coffee, but it’s balanced with all that sweetness. Citrusy cups can be downright bracing and puckering, but this coffee leans more into orange juice territory, where you get that bright citric acid fruitiness but there is a ton of sweetness along for the ride. I’d go so far as to say this would be a good coffee to calibrate yourself to if you’ve ever wondered “Gee, what does orange taste like in coffee? I don’t think I’ve ever tasted that…” This coffee has orange in spades and I love it!
As Espresso…
I had the time to stretch out and play with this coffee as espresso, too. I hit my caffeine limit quickly, so I tried a couple shots this morning and then had to stop, so I’ll continue to tweak my recipe and I think if I go a little finer with my grind it’ll be right where I want it. My first shot was 18.2g of coffee in the portafilter and I got 38.9g out in 28 seconds, so a little fast. This had nice flavors, very bright lemon candy, grapefruit, a lot of cherry, but it was bracing and too in-your-face. I tightened up the grind and pulled 18.2g again, this time getting 33.8g of espresso in 28 seconds. This shot was more balanced, not as bracing but still bright. It still had that lemon candy, less cherry, but it was still there, and a lot of spiciness, maybe like allspice or something along those lines. Tomorrow I’ll try a couple shots with an even finer grind and see where I can take this Bucksaw Blend!
For the ‘spro nerds, I’m using a Quick Mill Carola Evo with the temp set around 92-94 degrees C if I remember corretly. I replaced the stock shower screen with a IMS precision one. Aftermarket bottomless portafilter with IMS 16/20 precision basket. Tamper is a 58.5mm first gen Decent Espresso tamper calibrated to 25 lbs of pressure. Grinder is an Orphan Espresso Pharos that I modded with their kit to a 2.0 version.