Well, I've had problems with straight espresso - my stomach and system can't handle it. I was drinking cappuccinos almost exclusively - it worked, but not my favorite, because I enjoy the espresso flavor.

Got out of my rut, and started pulling double dosage of coffee - tight pull, but half the volume of water - I guess that's a ristretto? Love that flavor. Still, was having to follow it with some milk to make my stomach happy.

I remembered someone posting here about a macchiato, so I decided to take my itty bitty half full cup and top it off with some foamed milk.

I'm happy now. Love the espresso flavor - not overwhelmed with milk - my stomach likes the combo -

Took a little over a year - but damn it's worth the journey!

Ristretto Macchiato or Macchiato Ristretto?

I dunno, but it's pretty darn good!

Cooler brew temps are also easier on the stomach, and I find some of the Italian blends less acidic.

PC

peacecup wrote:Cooler brew temps are also easier on the stomach, and I find some of the Italian blends less acidic. PC

Please clarify: I understood "acidic," when used to describe coffee flavors, not to have any reference to ph (and therefore not have any effect on one's body chemistry.) Correct? Or not?

Oddly enough, taste acidity does correlate quite precisely to pH.

The old saw that the pH was the same for all coffee turns out to be wrong. pH test strips don't work right, since coffee has too many buffers; when tests are done by titration, the readings correlate with taste acidity.

Martin wrote:Please clarify: I understood "acidic," when used to describe coffee flavors, not to have any reference to ph (and therefore not have any effect on one's body chemistry.) Correct? Or not?

There's a lot of stuff going on in the stomach of the average human. I have no doubt that one can determine the real acidity of a given coffee, but am no expert on how one might go about that. What I'm reasonably sure of, however, is that the small amount of acid that is actually present in a coffee is probably not directly responsible, in the sense of something that can be "titrated," for whatever physical symptoms that a given person might have from drinking coffee in general or a coffee in specific. I mean this in the sense that if a specific coffee has more titratable acidity than another one, that the difference is small enough in the overall scheme of things, chez your stomach, that it doesn't matter.

What is going to matter is whatever else is going on in your stomach and how your stomach reacts to the coffee that you have consumed. This might be by stimulating the parietal cells in the stomach, that produce acid themselves, in response to whatever interests them, or some other factors, such as pre-existing ulceration or other irritation, colonization with harmful bacteria, etc. etc. etc.

So I think it is pretty unlikely that if you drink the same quantity (let's talk about weight of the grounds of coffee used, taking into consideration the extraction ratio or percentage) of XXX caffeinated coffee, it is not very likely that YYY coffee, no matter what the difference might be in titratable acidity, will produce different symptoms, as long as you don't know beforehand which one you are drinking. How putting this amount of coffee extract into milk might effect this in a given person, I am unqualified to comment upon, however I would regard it as unlikely to be easily generalized to the overall population.

ken