In my view, sure it's a perfectly good way of making something like espresso with good extraction, what a lot of coffee people call these days a turboshot. But it's not really providing what people usually want in an espresso: a concentrated, textured small coffee.
Lance does have some wonderful videos with great insight, I just wish he'd edit them down. There's so so so much filler and tangents and fuss. They're like 20 minutes when they could be 10-15. Then again I respect that he's doing his own way instead of copying James' immaculate production with clean aesthetic, which it seems like quite a few people are doing in the coffee YouTube world.
Basically no one outside of Italy (where the definition was created) takes a purist approach to espresso anymore. Certainly no one in barista competitions ever uses it for the last 20 years or so.
I can't recall the exact official definition but it's something like: 7g of coffee extracted under 9 bars of pressure at 94C yielding 14g of liquid.
It's extremely limiting, for example it's designed for dark roast and isn't ideal for medium/light specialty coffee where you might have to adjust the temperature and yield to get good results.
Modern high end espresso machines these days are starting to allow you to play with the variables and in the espresso community it's usually considered that anything over 6 bars is an espresso. Also, other techniques like pre-infusing at 1-3 bars before ramping up the pressure is common. Personally I'm partial to a long 20s pre-infusion at 1 bar before ramping up to 6-7bars. This yields a very sweet shot with a medium roast bean.
Oh for sure, I’m more arguing that it deserves a better name because as you note, it’s outside the normal for an espresso.
Pre infusion aside, the article starts at the low end of your definition but does have graphs that go as low as 4 bar.
That’s almost at the stage of being made using the pre infusion only, and perhaps I should try that as that’s down there.
I prefer a thick crema (for look and taste) but I’ll try drop the pressure down and see if I’m persuaded.
Regarding your long pre infusion - how much of the shot is being extracted after 20 seconds? I’d expect a good 5-10ml by that time but maybe your pressure is so low that little comes out.
> how much of the shot is being extracted after 20 seconds?
Basically zero, maybe one or two drops. You need to grind finer though and you need a grinder capable of that. A decent hand grinder is ok (e.g. 1zpresso jx pro or max) but for electric grinders you're into the $600+ range before you can do it, e.g. a specialita or a niche .
Pressure at the pump is not that relevant. What is relevant is the pressure at the point where pressurized water meets the coffee puck. And this pressure very much depends on multiple factors but let's say that the coffee ground level is one of the most important things. If you have a pump pumping water at 15 bars but you have a very coarse ground coffee in your basket, resulting pressure is _not_ going to be 15 bars. Similarly, if you grind the coffee at very fine levels then the resistance of the coffee puck will increase and therefore resulting pressure might very well end up being _more_ than 15 bars.
That said, another thing which plays a big role in the resulting pressure is the design of the brewing head and the design of your basket. Baskets can be either pressurized (they have a single hole through which the coffee will flow) or non-pressurized (they have a lot of small holes through all of which coffee will flow). You can imagine that the resulting pressure will depend on the type of the basket you're using.
Because cheaper appliances will by default use pressurized baskets, they will tweak the pump to some pressure level which they found to work the "best" for their type of machine and that level is exclusively much more than expected 9-10 bars. Nespresso will for the same reasons do the same with the difference that they make one step forward to take over the full control over the puck preparation process through their prepackaged pods.
Well you made some statements in your previous comment about pressure which suggested they were generally applied to espresso making. That simply isn't true.
Espresso machines without OPV are really a minority. Even single-boiler entry level machines like the Gaggia Classic or the Rancilio Silva have an OPV.
Parent comment seemed to suggest that (much) higher pressure produces better espresso and my comment had a sole intent, at the expense of simplifying some things, to give some grounds why espresso manufacturers might use higher than 9-10 bar pressure at the pump.
Gaggia Classic is a 350 EUR machine whereas Rancilio Silvia is 600 EUR machine. These are not entry level machines. They are entry level for someone becoming more interested in espresso but not for ordinary people. And ordinary people do not spend 400-500 EUR for a coffee machine if they think they are going to get the same for twice less money. Twice less money machines do not have OPV.
They are not going to explode but on such machines if you remove the portafilter straight after extracting the espresso, the puck will "explode" and is going to create a mess. In more expensive machines this is regulated through OPV and solenoid valve through which the pressure built up is going to be released.
Nespresso's taste is least likely to be anything anyone is looking for in a good espresso.
That high pressure causes some odd taste notes and it would cause channeling in the puck. Not to mention all sort of other issues which start already at ~11 bars.
I disagree and I've brewed many espressos many ways and I love a good espresso.
I found this article interesting because they talk about the complexity of espresso as being characteristic of a mix of extractions at different pressures. This is apparently different than the model they came up with to brew the perfect espresso. But they also note that 9-11 bars is too high and go as low as 7. Fascinating.
I’ve found there to be a distinct taste to Nespresso and go some way to avoid it (literally in some cases, it’s in cafes all over Europe). I’m not sure if it’s the coffee container or the high pressure and bean combo but it’s taste is not something I’d ever aim for.
I strongly believe that the Nespresso was designed to solve/create a problem to fit their business model.
In this order: Proprietary, good margin, small foot print (pods and extraction unit), easy to use, disposable.
That Euro cafe served nespresso coffee is different then the nespesso capsules for making espresso. I've had so I understand what you mean. The nespresso pod machines, it sure is a razorblade model but you can get quite and varied espressos.
Not impressed by that article, it's sensationalist and fairly uninformed. Not terrible either, it's just typical newspaper science reporting. Sounds good until they write about a subject that you know about and then you realize it's actually pretty bad.
> Espresso is always – always – extracted with a water pressure between 9 and 10 bars.
No, it's not. Especially amongst enthusiasts experimenting with pressure is extremely common. Although it is true that many machines are locked to 9 bars, it's also true that most cheaper home machines are set to 11/12 bars, and high end machines are starting to allow you to customize the pressure, even changing it throughout a shot.
It's my experience that most espresso folk would say anything from 6-12 bars is an espresso, although going over 9 is usually frowned on.
It all comes down to the roast profile and the personal preference of the person drinking the coffee.
Before the Nordic Countries influenced the roasting style of espresso an overdosed and under extracted espresso was palatable. After the influence a cup brewed like this was incredibly acidic. Like reflux in a cup.
Over dosed and over tamped, the thicker the shot the better. Then a splash of milk to take off the bitter edge. Others can disagree but that’s my beverage. It’s also not an espresso, and is probably a macchiato.
Are Nordic countries to blame for this style? Naples in particular but Italy and also France are known for a pretty acid coffee.
In the specialty coffee scene I would say so. I think Tim Wendelboe influenced a lot of roasters within that part of the industry all around the world.
Specialty coffee isn't just a buzzword too although it is often used as one. It specifically refers to green (raw) coffee rated 80-100 by a qualified grader. When you are paying good money for a quality coffee it doesn't make much sense to roast out the individual characteristics of the coffee i.e you either roast off the acidity and the aromatics or you keep the aromatics but accept higher levels of acidity.
I travelled to Italy and France before I got into specialty coffee. At the time the style of coffee in Italy at best was a nice simple chocolate/caramel/toffee cup. Not overly acidic at all. All the coffees I had in France were terrible. The best way to describe them would be ashtray/bitter. I know in later years people from the Australian scene moved to (or back to) Paris and opened shops importing specialty coffee from other European countries or just started roasting their own.
To be fair thought you can't talk about coffee without taking price into consideration. Quality varies wildly too within a given market even though price may stay the same. A few anecdotal experiences in different cities can have you comparing the equivalent of a loaf of bread purchased at the supermarket to a loaf of bread baked by an artisan.
I struggled to find decent espresso in Paris and went for a walk, bypassing anywhere that has a full automatic machine. I found a cafe with a nice looking machine and went in and ordered.
They grabbed me the next coffee off the line of pre-made Nespressos that were sitting in a bench out back.
I am firmly planted in the Nordic coffee tradition (living in Scandinavia) but the most over the top place to appreciate coffee was in Substance Cafe in Paris. It's like a japanese ramen bar but instead of pots in the middle there's kettles and a menu of coffees they have on offer.
Ran into people competing in barista championships there, so yeah, you can get decent coffee there.
This is purely subjective of course, but my story: I'm danish but abroad, but I had heard so much about "the coffee collective" that I went out of my way to go there and try it. I was absolutely stunned by the experience. This was the worst disgusting sour ... "drink" I had ever had. Being of the scientific persuasion I had repeated the experience twice more before bailing.
Yeah, so I respectively disagree. The best coffee I've ever had was from Caffè Artigiano in Vancouver.
As a person with technical background, I found espresso brewing process really fascinating and I always thought that it could be expressed through a set of non-trivial mathematical equations and now there it is - it's all in this paper :D
"As we demonstrated in Figure 3, our model informs us that a reduction in dry coffee mass results in an increased EYmax (shown schematically in blue in Figure 6). Thus, a barista is able to achieve highly reproducible espresso with the same EY as the 20 g espresso by reducing the coffee mass to 15 g and counter-intuitively grinding much coarser (as shown in red, Figure 6B). This modification may result in very fast shots (<15 s), a reduction in espresso concentration, and a different flavor profile."
The claim in the paper is that extraction efficiency goes up so it should roughly as strong as a normal espresso but using less coffee.
I haven't tried it yet myself so no idea if that's true or not.
However my expectation is that it's probably fine, just with a bit less complexity of flavor and no crema. We can argue about whether crema is a good thing or not but I can say for sure that if you serve espresso without crema in a cafe, you'll get complaints, no matter how good it tastes. Appearance matters.
That’s a good observation. I’d be unhappy if there was no crema if I was paying and while I wouldn’t complain, I’d remake any shot that didn’t contain it if making my own.
But as you say, it may be a visual thing. A shot made from robusta looks amazing. The taste is often (but not always) harsh at best.
In my view, sure it's a perfectly good way of making something like espresso with good extraction, what a lot of coffee people call these days a turboshot. But it's not really providing what people usually want in an espresso: a concentrated, textured small coffee.