Yeah, I know.  Everyone loves great coffee, or at least lots of people do.  I really love it, but the odd thing is I don’t drink it very often.  I kind of have to be in the mood for it.

I have a friend that used to own a coffee bar…  Think Starbucks but much less snobby.  It was actually in a spot he, and later a partner, leased at the base of the escalators in a department store.  What he did well was study what other coffee shops did, and he picked the things that several other places did well without copying the stuff they did poorly.  The shop was just a 3-sided counter, chalkboard menus, a few stools and a couple of small tables, but they did a good amount of business, and they got coffee from a great coffee roaster.  Before getting to know the owner, I was remembered as the guy that ordered coffee drinks with 4 shots of espresso.

Over time, I got to know the guys working there really well, and found myself stopping in almost every day for a coffee.  The owner and I became good friends; he actually invited me to go to the church where I still go and where I met my wife.  On Fridays back in the mid-90s, I’d sit at the bar having a coffee, and my friend would get busy talking to people… Customers would back up, so I’d jump behind the espresso machine and make them drinks!  I learned a lot about coffee and espresso that way.

Around that time, I got a Krups espresso machine for home.  This was also a time when a lot of cheap espresso machines were put out using boilers instead of pumps.  The difference is the amount of pressure used.  Boilers put out 2-3 atmospheres of pressure, vs 15 or so from a pump.  The difference is easy to see if you compare.  With pump machines, there’s a wide variety of prices, from around $150 for a decent machine to several thousands, from fully manual lever machines to fully automatic.  I think for most home use, something in the $150-$200 should work great.  Anything beyond that is for aesthetics or convenience.

There’s something kind of therapeutic about making espresso.  Without pods or automatic machines, it’s messy.  Heck, even with them, it can be messy!  First you have to grind the beans.  I don’t have much counter space, so I don’t have a grinder for espresso and have mine ground in half pound amounts or less (for freshness).  If you have a pump machine, you really need a burr grinder (conical burr grinders are the best) to get a fine enough grind.  A typical blade coffee grinder won’t really work for espresso as it won’t grind the coffee fine enough. Oh, and you can use whatever coffee you want, but the darker roasts work best, as the oils are more extracted (which also means there’s less caffeine, actually, as it’s cooked out).

With espresso, the water is being passed through the grounds much faster than usual, so the grind has to be very fine to ensure the oils are exposed to the water so that the flavor gets extracted.  Surface area is the key here.  However, if the grind is too fine, the espresso machine can clog.  Most new pump machines don’t have a problem with this, though.

Now that the mornings are cooler and it’s dark a bit later, it’s coffee time for me!  I’m more in the mood for coffee this time of year than any other.  I got some ground espresso (just a quarter pound) that I keep in an airtight metal container to keep light away from it as well as air.  I always have done double shots of espresso, so I put in 2 scoops of grounds into the basket and tamped it down.

The tamping is actually important.  The grounds need to be tamped to compact them, but not so much that the water can’t get through.  This is kind of a trial and error kind of thing.  I just put the tamper over the grounds, push a bit and twist a bit, and that’s all.  The basket gets twisted into the machine, and, once the machine is ready, a couple of shots are pulled.  I usually pull less than 2 ounces total, and I use stainless steel espresso cups that look like little pitchers.  Over-extracting pulls out more bitterness and dilutes the real flavor, I think.

One of the things you get with espresso is crema; it’s the creamy foam on top that’s a dark caramel color.  It just tells you the espresso is right.  The espresso I have right now is probably ground not quite fine enough, so the crema isn’t as thick as I like to see it.

After the coffee is extracted, I fill a frothing pitcher up about 1/3 of the way and put the frothing/steaming nozzle into the milk.  It takes some practice, but there’s a spot where the steam coming out makes just the right noise and produces the most foam.  Too far out, and the milk bubbles and slops around; too far in, and the milk just gets hot.  For lattes, just steaming the milk is all that’s needed, but for a cappuccino, the more foam, the better.  I prefer my capps to be dry, meaning more foam than milk.  Some prefer them wet (more milk than foam) or in the middle of the two extremes.  I always use a thermometer, and the milk is ready when it’s in the 140-160 degree F range (my thermometer has this range marked in red, which is nice).

Once the milk is ready, I pour the coffee into a mug, then hold the foam back with a spoon and pour a bit of the steamed milk into the coffee.  I then spoon the foam onto the top of all of that.  If someone wants syrup or sugar, I put that into the coffee before adding the milk and foam.

That’s all there is to it, except the cleanup.  Espresso grounds that are all wet are a pain.  I use a stainless steel tub with a rubber hose attached so the basket can be hit against the hose to get the grounds out.  The grounds are a mess, always, but that’s part of the game!  It’s a process that gets you into the coffee, as you need to understand the process enough to know when and how to do the steps.  But it’s not difficult, and any good coffee shop will help walk you through it.  Just go in when they’re not busy and ask for advice.

As messy as all this is, there’s nothing quite like a good espresso, cappuccino or latte on a cold autumn morning.  The bitter, earthy taste just seems right when the air is crisp.  Not everything great has to be made on a smoker.

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