I just finished an introductory espresso course and want to document what I learned in that course. I’m clearly not an expert — a few Youtube videos and this course are the extent of my knowledge.
Shout out to Trent at Timberline Coffee School for the fun and educational workshop. Liz got me a class for Christmas and it was great.
The first realization I had is its more useful to think about coffee as a class of drinks instead of a specific drink itself. Much like tea, there are an assortment of flavours and options available depending on your taste. These days, there is no singular flavour of coffee as you may have noticed if you’ve been to different coffee shops.
This list is not meant to be exhaustive, just notes to myself.
- When brewing coffee, the flavours of that come out of the beans are roughly (in order) → acidic, sweet, and bitter. This is useful for understanding how to adjust the flavour of your espresso. While the roast of the beans will define parts of the flavour profile, so too will how you brew. Too acidic means you aren’t extracting for long enough. Too bitter, the inverse. To get the right flavour for you, use this as a rough guide.
- For my purposes, the generic espresso recipe to follow is 2:1. Two parts espresso for every one part coffee. For the machine we have, that means 18g of ground coffee to ~36g of espresso out. This is the target. You basically just push water through the espresso until you hit that ratio.
- The next variable in the equation is the brew time. A simple target is 20-35 seconds. I don’t know why you would or wouldn’t go beyond this, but much like the generic recipe, I’m just accepting this. My goal is to make tasty coffee not win awards.
- From all of this we are left with the basic approach – Grind 18g of coffee, get 36g of espresso out, and do so within 20-35s.
- Your range for modifying flavours comes with how much time you spend brewing. Going back to #1, if we have too much acidity (sour tastes) we want the spend more time pushing water through. But how can we control this if the time it takes to go through is fixed?
- The final variable to worry about is the grind size. More coarse coffee will have water run through it faster, reducing brew time. Finer coffee will have water run through it more slowly, increasing brew time. Using this as your guide, you can adjust the grind as your primary variable, sticking within the other recipe parameters, to find the right spot for you. A simple heuristic is pebbles vs sand. Water will run through pebbles (coarse) far quicker than sand (fine).
- Don’t make coffee too soon after roasting. It takes 1-2 weeks for enough CO2 to be removed for the coffee to taste good.
- Don’t wait too long to make your coffee either. It seems like for most people the 2 weeks – 2 months range is probably ideal.
- I prefer dark roast over light roast. I should try to remember this.
- For some reason, every decaf roast I encounter is very light. I wonder if that’s why it always tastes too sour for my liking. I might do some research to determine if this is circumstantial (companies just roast it this way) or is it a property of how we make decaf. I still want to find a tasty decaf and all the ones touted as tasty are…not. I found WIMP coffee and want to give it a go but shipping to Canada is insane. I’m not ready to pay $75 for a bag of coffee.
- Coffee tastes different at different temperatures and different cups. Generally as the coffee cools it becomes more acidic.
- Acidic & sweet flavours are less strong at extreme temperatures (further from base body heat). When coffee is very hot it may taste more bitter. 75-80ºF is likely a good range. This is one reason something like Coke tastes way sweeter/different at room temperature. I haven’t verified this but it was the example used in the class.
- Crema looks pretty but has bad flavour. Mix your cup before drinking it.
- I like doing hands on workshops like these. I should really do more of them.
I’m doing my best not to get too absorbed in the rabbit hole that is espresso. I have a weakness for gadgets, and coffee culture is ripe with them. I am purely working in the good-enough camp and wrote this as my own personal reference as I try finding a good decaf.