courghan wrote:Hello all,
I been have following this really interesting post and I feel I can share my "personal" espresso experience. I am Italian and I have been living in Dublin, Ireland, for the past 3 years. I started my home-barista experience last year and started using the techniques I could mainly read of on the web, which mostly indicates the 30lb tamp as the way to go. I did use to get good shots but also a low level of consistency and repeatability...at a point I started to think if it was worth all the effort (adjusting grind frequently, dosing, distributing, WDT etc...) for an espresso which at my place, in Rome, takes a few seconds to be made.
Then I went back home last week and, as a home-barista wannabe, I went to my favorite bars (in Italy a bar is where you go for breakfast and lunch) and looked at how the espresso was made. It looks so simple and tastes so good.
What they all do is a non-full basket and a very very light tamp! Most places actually just gently push the PF up onto the plastic built-in tamper in the grinders! I haven't seen a barista using a professional "tamper"...it is actually quite hard to find one to buy! So, I got some of my favorite espresso blend (Tazza d'Oro), roasted only an hour before and brought it back to Dublin where all the gear is...and I have to agree that a smaller dose, very light tamp and maybe a little polishing at the end does produce an much more enjoyable espresso than overdosing and 30lb tamp (IMO of course!) !
Some really experienced professional barista actually explained me that if the coffee is perfectly ground you do not even have to tamp as the bed of water between the shower screen and the puck will do all the job.
Although my reply may not be 100% "on-topic" I have to admit that maybe producing a very good cup of espresso does not have to be that hard...
I also want to say that virtually nobody drinks double espressos in Italy...that may also explain the difference in the blends and the taste the machines are designed to produce in the cup...
You raise many interesting points. Before I comment I would first like to apologize to Andy Schecter for using this post, once again, to "repeat myself." I do this only because we N. Americans (and other home users who follow the N. American based boards) have been sold a huge
bill of goods, a big
ration of MALARKY, that we have adhered to since we got into this passion for coffee and espresso. It is going to take many more posts and threads like this one to overcome the
tons and tons of horse poop that pass for espresso making instructions on the internet coffee sites.
Let me expound on what I'll call
The Big Lie:
Like any big lie, there are a few nuggets of truth, that are hidden within and which seem to give credence to the rest of it, but in reality these nuggets of truth are like the edible bit of cheese you might cut out of the center of a piece of 8 year old cheese that has green mold (and maybe insects) all over it
; not enough to justify the purchase!
The central thesis of the big lie is that making espresso is difficult, requiring months or years of training; afterall, espresso making is a
skill, kind of like brain surgery! And you wouldn't want your noggin operated on by just any old Italian bar man, would you? Speaking of those Italians (the theory goes), they are kind of lazy and complacent and they don't do any research on espresso machines because they are happy making the crap they have been making all these years, so why bother? And by the way, they use cheap coffee in their blends to save money and then they ship boatloads of the old stale crap coffee over here to distant shores, trying to sell it for premium prices with the mystique of being Italian and hence it must be good.
The nugget of truth in this story is yes, they do use fairly uninteresting and cheaper coffee in many of their blends and yes they do ship the stuff over here when it is already too far gone, too stale, to be worth using. Simply by using better coffees, many N. American roasters have been able to produce superior roasted coffees and blends; there is no question about that.
The
malarky part is that espresso making is difficult and requires great skill and care. In fact, espresso making is very simple, so simple that when done properly, as the machines were designed to work, the basics could be taught in half an hour. No wonder the Italian barmen make it look
easy; It
is easy.
Where we went wrong in N. America, and in the enthusiast community was in cramming too much coffee into the PF baskets. This fits in very well with what I'll call the
North American Ethos; this is that if 1 tsp of sugar is good, than 2 are better; if 4 months in an oak barrel makes a good Chablis, why not make the American Chardonnay with 12 months in the oak? If a portion of food that can be eaten by a normal person without becoming fat is good, why not serve him twice as much?
French people I have met, both in France and here in the USA, often say that everything over here is "trop," or "too much." They have a point, and this view is not just unique to French people, it is shared by most western Europeans. So why not use 43% more coffee than the Italians designed their espresso machines to work with? It's the American way! This is the mentality we are dealing with here. We have met the enemy and it is . . . .
us
As a result of these myths, that we over here in N. America know better, and that a better espresso is made with 18 or 20 or god forbid 24g of coffee, people have to jump through all sorts of hoops just to get the espresso machine to force the water through all that coffee, without spraying coffee all over the counter or even on the ceiling! And the result is not really espresso, it is a
caricature of an espresso. Like that plate of tasteless food piled high to the ceiling, it is uniquely American.
And if that is what you, my fellow home espresso enthusiasts, want to drink, I say, I hope to hell that you enjoy it.
Maybe we could, instead, take the best of both worlds and start to really make the worlds best espresso over here! All that would take is to use the better coffees we are willing to pay for, and then use the espresso machine to make espresso with the amount of coffee that it was designed to use in the first place! That would be my suggestion.
To those who doubt these ideas, I make one simple suggestion. Buy yourself a scale that can weigh out to increments of 0.1g, which seems like overkill but their accuracy is actually a bit less than it appears so this is the right sort of scale to buy. Adjust your grinder so that you can dose in the range of 12-15g per double shot. Dispense with all your former silly espresso making routines, and compare the results to what you have been getting previously, but give this approach enough time to really judge the results. You may need to use different coffees or blends than before, since many were designed for updosing, but I think you will be happy with the results of this technique, for which the machines were designed in the first place.
ken
