Espresso is the drink that symbolises Made in Italy around the world.
It helped build the idea of the Italian ‘dolce vita’, of conviviality, dialogue and community.
It is consumed daily by 95% of the adult population. In other words: we all drink it every day and appreciate it like few other things in the world.
But do we really know what espresso is?
Today we talk a little bit about it and I reveal 3 aspects that you may not know yet!
The bitterness of the espresso
Over the years, I have noticed that there are two different interpretations on this subject:
- Those of the customers that ‘if the coffee is not bitter, it is not real coffee’.
- And those, ‘I don’t understand why people say something so bitter is good’.
So customers who like it and want it like air and others who are dissatisfied with it.
Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret: coffee does not have to be bitter, or at least not excessively so and annoyingly so.
The bitterness in fact stems from:
- Caffeine: in Robusta coffee there is twice as much caffeine as in Arabica, so the average Robusta is more bitter
- From the area where the plant is grown: the more coffee grows in the plains, the more bitter it is. So again, it is the Robustas that express more bitterness, precisely because they grow on the plains. While the Arabicas, growing from 900 to 2200 m altitude are sweeter and/or more acidic
- From roasting: over-roasting makes the coffee lonely and very bitter, renouncing all other positive aromatic notes or sweet and sour tastes
- From the extraction: if your barista is not trained and does not know how to brew coffee properly, he might offer you an under- or over-extracted cup. The result is a big, bad bitterness.
The watchword here is BALANCE, between soft bitterness, sweetness and acidity.
If the coffee you drink is instead just very bitter, it could be either of low quality or badly prepared!
High and thick cream is not synonymous with quality
How many of you are only looking for body and a nice thick crema in your espresso?
And how many have done the famous ‘sugar test’ to understand its quality?
Be aware that unfortunately cream, especially thick cream, is not synonymous with quality!
Make no mistake, espresso by definition must have both a good body that envelops the tongue and a compact crema, which retains the drink’s aromas until tasting.
Espresso is in fact a very concentrated drink, if it did not have the body it would be an ‘American-style’ filter coffee.
But the crema of a high-quality coffee is hazelnut in colour, thin, smooth, shiny, compact and persistent.
Let’s take a closer look at the different characteristics:
- Hazelnut colour: therefore a nice warm and inviting brown. If it is pale or, on the contrary, too dark, it means that the coffee has been badly prepared and will therefore also taste unpleasant.
- Thin: it should in fact only be a few millimetres thick, an indication of a good extraction and above all of a quality raw material. When you see a really thick cream full of air, it is usually Robusta coffee, which is considered less valuable. Moreover, being full of air it will disappear much faster.
- Smooth: we can say like oil! That is, without ‘waves’ and without the classic orange-peel effect.
- Shine: then try putting the coffee against the light and see if it reflects it!
- Compact: no micro or macro bubbles.
- Persistent in time: this means that it must last at least 1 minute from the end of extraction, precisely because it is responsible for retaining all the aromatic notes in the drink until we taste it. If you receive an espresso with the crema already ‘pierced’, where you can see underneath the drink, ask for it to be made again!
So it is right to say that the crema is an indicator of the quality or otherwise of an espresso, but it is wrong to say that the quality one is the thick one, because it is just the opposite!
Sugar in espresso
I will deal with this point quickly: if you need sugar to drink it, perhaps the coffee is defective or has been prepared incorrectly!
As mentioned in the first point, coffee should have a balanced taste between bitterness, sweetness and acidity, while also presenting a wide and fine range of aromas.
If the coffee is good and prepared well, putting sugar in becomes a waste!
Sugar would, in fact, make all coffees the same, excessively sweet, thus losing the balance and, above all, covering all the most precious and delicate aromatic notes!
I also understand that if you have been drinking coffee with sugar all your life, removing it, especially if you buy low-quality coffee, is not easy. I’ve been there myself, even going so far as to put three packets of sugar in one espresso.
First of all, I approached the world of quality coffee by reducing the sachets to one per coffee. Then I decided I wanted to eliminate it altogether.
The first two weeks were terrible because I didn’t like the taste. But I stuck it out and slowly got used to it.
After a couple of months, however, I said to myself: ‘Today I’m going to drink my coffee the way I like it, I’ll put a packet of sugar in for once’, and nothing I threw it away, I made it again. It no longer seemed like coffee to me, but a coffee-flavoured syrup, I could no longer perceive all that aromatic range that makes it special and memorable.
So try taking the sugar out too and hang in there for the first month! You’ll never be able to put it back on again!
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Coffee Lover
