Espresso

While all coffee for espresso should have a finer grind, making small adjustments in coffee grind size can drastically change your results. If you use a grinder to make the coffee bean slightly finer, not only will you expose more of your coffee’s surface area to your water, but you’ll slow down the flow of the hot water, adding time as you are brewing coffee . Both of these changes will result in less sour flavor and more sweetness for your espresso drink, but if you go too far, you could make your brewed coffee taste bitter. Grinding coarser (and therefore reducing your brew time) could make your coffee beverage less bitter, but if you go too far could make it too sour. Finding that literal sweet spot in brewing espresso is the challenge (and, when you get it right, the joy!) of making good espresso (or, as coffee professionals call it, “dialing in”).

Any coffee can be decaffeinated! The decaffeination processes our roasters use removes 99.9 percent of caffeine from any regularly brewed coffee coffee. Espresso coffee is usually roasted for longer than a non-espresso drink, creating a roasty flavor profile. You can still roast espresso beans to an espresso roast no matter the level of caffeine within the coffee bean!

Italians were the first to build and patent espresso machines. The first coffee maker used for brewing espresso coffee was built and patented by Angelo Moriondo in Turin, Italy in 1884. The original espresso machine consisted of a large boiler that heated water to 1.5 bars of pressure. That pressure pushed the hot water through the bed of the coffee grounds, with a second boiler that produced steam that would flash through the bed of the coffee grounds and complete the brew cycle. Luigi Bezzera improved upon the original espresso machine with a new patent in 1903 that introduced the portafilter and multiple brewing heads. Desiderio Pavoni bought those patents and improved upon them further still, creating a pressure release valve and steam wand to hold additional steam built up within the boiler. Bezzera and Pavoni debuted their espresso maker machines at the 1906 Milan Fair, thus introducing the world to “caffè espresso”.