Academy Blend

About the Coffee

Academy Blend is Pilot's everyday blend, built to hold up across brew methods but designed to shine brightest as a drip coffee. It's a medium roast that sits at the intersection of approachable and interesting, with enough brightness and sweetness to keep things lively without leaning into anything extreme. Pilot recommends letting it rest 7 to 10 days after roast before brewing, which lets the coffee settle and its flavours come through more cleanly.

The blend reflects Pilot's direct sourcing approach, built on longer-term relationships with producer partners rather than one-off spot purchases. That continuity gives them more visibility into each harvest and more room to adjust roasting to what the crop actually delivers in a given year. The result is a blend that stays consistent from bag to bag, even as the underlying coffees shift with the seasons.

For brewing, Pilot's own recipe for auto-drip calls for 20g of coffee to 300ml of water at a 1:15 ratio, with a brew time around 3 minutes and 30 seconds. AeroPress drinkers can try 15.5g to 248ml at 1:16, same brew time. Espresso pulls at 1:2.5, 20g in and 50ml out, in about 32 seconds.

About Pilot Coffee Roasters

Pilot started in May 2009 when Andy Wilkin and Jessie Holmes opened Te Aro Roasted in Toronto's Leslieville neighbourhood, operating out of a former car garage. Wilkin had just earned his Q Grader certification (a standardized professional qualification for evaluating coffee quality) and drew inspiration from the cafe culture of Te Aro, Wellington, where he grew up. The space ran as both a cafe and a small roastery from the start.

By 2013, the operation rebranded as Pilot Coffee Roasters and moved roasting to a dedicated facility at 50 Wagstaff Drive in Toronto. The sourcing philosophy has stayed consistent since the early days: build ongoing relationships with coffee producers rather than buying on the open market, and stay involved in the supply chain from farm to cup.