jimbro wrote:Now that I'm making the effort to acquire fresh beans within a few days of roast, I would like to know how the roaster taste tests his product? I have always enjoyed my espresso with a fair amount of sugar--my wife believes it's too much--so how are they tasting it, with or without sugar? And at home, how should I be tasting and evaluating?

On sugar: In Italy, where the overwhelming majority of coffee is drunk as straight espresso, using about a teaspoon of sugar per single shot is the norm. Now, Italian espresso blends are, for the most part, blended from inexpensive commodity coffees, and need the sugar to be properly balanced. Specialty coffees are sweeter than commodity coffees, since they are hand picked when fully ripe (coffee ripens unevenly, and industrial picking mixes unripe and ripe cherries). Moreover, espresso blenders tend to use coffees that balance sweeter than coffees designed for straight brewing. So high end espresso blends do not need sugar.

However, many US blends using only specialty coffee are primarily designed for milk drinks, and may be roasted too dark, or use beans that are bitter enough to punch through a lot of milk. These can mostly use some sugar too.

On tasting espresso: Tasting is not the same as appreciative drinking. With all due respect to Randy, his article is about appreciative drinking, not tasting. The difference ought to be completely obvious, but for some reason it isn't. Tasting is done for a purpose, appreciating is done for enjoyment. When Toyota does quality control, they don't ask a high schooler to drive the car and opine on how cool it is, they check that the car works as designed. Tasting is exactly like this. I taste espresso for three reasons: to pick which of several coffees I will use, how I will roast them, and how I will make the shot. For the first two, I initially drink the coffees brewed and roasted very light, since this tells me more about bean and roast selection than pulling shots. I pull shots to fine tune the roasting and the shot parameters. When I do this, I'm not trying to enjoy the espresso (although I frequently do), I'm trying to check how closely it conforms to the flavor I wanted. So when you ask about tasting espresso, the answer is another question -- for what purpose are you tasting it?

On appreciating espresso Randy's article is good.