Good morning and welcome to today’s review where I’m checking out Bad Dog, a “signature roast” coffee from one of my local favorites, Oddly Correct in Kansas City. Enjoy!
Order this coffee directly for $12/12oz
ODDLY CORRECT BAD DOG SIGNATURE ROAST
Oddly Correct is a well-known, local Kansas City roaster that is special to me because I was starting my own deep dive into coffee around the time they got their start here. Before they even had a shop open I sampled some of their coffee at a sidewalk sale in the Westport neighborhood here, served up by one of the founders, Greg Kolsto. They opened a small shop about 10 years ago and have been one of my favorites since. A very lightly roasted washed Ethiopian I had from them shortly after they opened that was more tea-like that coffee really opened my eyes to what these beans can be, and it was shortly after that I started KC Coffee Geek. So, they’re special to me. Oddly Correct garnered a local reputation for not having any cream or sugar station and not using any flavorings, and they relaxed that slightly about a year ago to appeal to a wider audience. This hasn’t diluted what I love about OC one bit, which is well-sourced coffee expertly roasted.
I’ve been trying to spread some money around my locals during these Covid times and a few weeks ago I bought a bag of their Bad Dog signataure roast. This has been around for a while and I’ve never had it. I was looking for something to use as espresso as I was in between coffees at home, so the “dark(ish) roast” of Bad Dog sounded like something to try. You can’t talk about Oddly Correct without mentioning the bags. A couple years ago they switched away from the kraft paper one-off linocut letterpress printed bags Greg made. I think he still does all the artwork for the bags, but I’m not sure if they are still letterpressed next door in the roastery or if they’ve switched to some other printing method. Bad Dog features a dog getting ready to pop a squat into a coffee cup, which I have to say is both funny and unappealing at the same time. Poop in a cup is the furthest thing I think of with Oddly Correct’s coffee and I doubt they’re wanting to tell customers this coffee is that, but that’s the unintended message, at least to my brain. Nonetheless, I managed to get over it! LOL
Bad Dog is a signature roast, meaning that the coffee changes with seasonality, but that the roast level or flavors pulled from the roast are constant. This is Oddly Correct’s “dark(ish) roast,” which visually looks like a solidly medium roast. OC is known for very light roasts and getting lots of origin character from their coffees, so relatively speaking, this is a darker roast for Oddly, but I’d call it a medium in the grand spectrum of coffee. This iteration of Bad Dog is a single origin Mexican coffee from Chiapas. The intended profile is, “full, sweet and satisfying for your everyday drinking pleasure.”
I’m using my standard pourover method 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 pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimze agitation during brewing and my grinder is a Knock Aergrind for pourovers. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and a total brew time, bloom included, of 3:30.
The aroma from the Origin is awesome. Little bit of brown sugar and TONS of perfectly marshmallow are coming out of the brewer. So good. Taking a sip, this is a medium-bodied coffee for me with a lot of presence on my palate. There’s more of that marshmallow in the sweetness of the cup and lots of dark chocolate or cocoa notes here, as promised. The front end of the sip is sweet and then the bitterness of the cup comes through to balance it out nicely. Just like with a good quality dark chocolate, there is both sweetness and bitterness balanced and complementing one another in coffee and this is a great example of that. There’s a little apple acidity for me in this cup to offer a bit of high end and structure to this coffee, too. In the almost-room temp cup I’m getting a bit more of that apple note, and the chocolate-like sweetness/bitterness interplay is accentuated. This coffee finishes sweet for me and has a nice cocoa note on the finish. There’s a hint of black pepper in the immediate aftertaste but between sips this coffee leaves a coating of almost milk chocolate on my palate. I don’t do milk or sugar, but I’m sure Bad Dog would take well to both. This iteration of Bad Dog is a bit lacking in complexity, but then again, Oddly Correct is billing this as a slightly darker daily drinker and they nail it for that purpose. Bad Dog checks all the boxes that blends usually get from me… easy drinking, familiar and appealing flavors, versatility and doesn’t fatigue the palate or the mind. If you’re on a search for complexity, any of Oddly Correct’s other single origin offerings will get you there, and it’s nice to have a consistent crowd pleaser for the folks just looking for a sweet, simple cup of coffee. Yum!
Will it ‘Spro?
Yes, yes it will! I had to grind quite a bit finer for this coffee than for others I’ve been drinking recently, but once it was dialed in, this is a nice cup. I found good flavors in the classic “normale” pulling a 1:2 ratio in 25-26 seconds. 18g in, 36g on the nose out in 25-26 seconds. This produced a medium-bodied espresso with a pleasant, thin crema and most of the same flavors I was getting in the pourover. There is more brightness in the espresso, with a lemon candy acidity that mostly came out in the finish of the sip and early aftertaste. There is still cocoa and dark chocolate and if I kept the coffee in my mouth for a weirdly long time (say, 10 seconds or so), I was getting some nice cherry notes that I didn’t perceive otherwise. In the lingering aftertaste there is maybe a hint of raisin, too. This is a nice espresso that I think would take milk or sugar nicely, particularly in a small milky like a cortado or macchiato. Another yum!
