Thom Bargen Los Rosales Coffee Beans
A smooth, golden-middle flavour profile from a high-class Winnipeg coffee roaster.
INTRODUCTION
While on a recent trip to Winnipeg, Canada, I was doing the customary Yelp search for quality coffee and came across Thom Bargen. Winnipeg has a general “small-town” reputation amongst the bigger cities in Canada and in addition to being surprised at the grand architecture in Winnipeg’s downtown, I was also impressed by the proportionally wide range of excellent coffee shops. This is certainly a town that punches above its weight and I’d encourage anyone to take a visit to what I dub the Philadelphia of Canada.
Thom Bargen, with its thoughtful use of interior design and typography caught my eye immediately compared to the other candidates as a place that might resonate with my taste. I wasn’t let down. In fact, I went back twice more in my two day stay to dig deeper into all they are doing. From the staff to the environment to the cups of coffee, I liked it all.
Since trying out the Toronto Coffee Club and falling in love with the Detour Los Rosales beans, I have been searching for an equivalent that is still available. Sadly Detour has stopped production of theirs. It seemed fortuitous that Thom Bargen has a bean from the Los Rosales area of Columbia. I bought a bag and when I returned home I put it through my proprietary brewing process:
Grind 8 grams of coffee fine in my 1Zpresso coffee grinder
Put in my German hyper-fine tea infuser
Pourover 130 grams of boiling water, cover
Wait 7 minutes
Remove infuser, wait 10 seconds
Taste
I developed this method after an exhaustive experimentation with numerous other methods and machines. I got the inspiration for this highly simple method while watching professional tasters putting grinds in a cup, waiting for them to steep and then drinking. My method is the closest ideologically to theirs and it is also low-effort. No grinds in the teeth here. The results, in my opinion are the most consistent and provide the best flavour of anything I’ve yet tried. It’s also easily repeatable with any new bean and allows a degree of tuning by adjusting water, time and grind to fully maximize the flavour of each type of coffee.
THE TASTE
My favorite coffee profile is rich, smooth, with a hint of chocolate and the smell of American walnut. I dislike the common trend of super dark roasts, bitterness or sourness, high acidity, fruit-heavy, floral, or “barnyard”. In essence, the Detour Roasters Los Rosales beans instantly defined my standard and the 30 or so beans I’ve tried since are merely a search to emulate it.
The Thom Bargen Los Rosales beans are at this moment the closest approximation I’ve found. They have a smooth, middle-ground taste erring neither bitter nor sour, yet with a big rich mouth feel. This is like a good mid-priced Cabernet to use a wine analogy. Not highly characterful, but without any major flaws and eminently drinkable every day and as the base of any milk-mix coffee.
My one negative feeling about it is the smell is not nearly as addictive as other beans, and certainly doesn’t have that feeling of pure happiness of the Detour Los Rosales. This is an aged walnut wood smell, not a fresh sawn one. It hints at slightly burnt, or perhaps over-roasted. I’ve tried various adjustments to the brewing process in order to extract more of the flavour I like and the beans have responded well. My regular grind with slightly more time and water seems to extract a little smoother flavour with less of “old nut” overtone.
The adaptivity of the beans and their inherent balance bodes well for multiple brewing methods and long term dialling-in, making this both a top notch bean and with wide appeal.
PRICE
$16.00 USD
AVAILABILITY
https://www.thombargen.com/
THE RATING
5/10 Absolute
7/10 Relative
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