Espresso is a smaller drink, brewed more quickly with very finely ground coffee under high pressure. It’s highly concentrated, which also allows you to use it as an ingredient in milk drinks like lattes and cappuccinos and create a beverage that doesn’t taste watered down.

Espresso is just another brew method, so you can technically use any coffee you want to make espresso. A coffee labeled as espresso means that the roaster has developed that roast specifically to make it taste great as espresso. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use everything from regular house blends to super fruity light roasts to make espresso if you so desire. Trade will match you to coffees we think you’ll love as espresso, whether they say espresso on the bag or not.

Espresso is strong because you’re using less water but a similar amount of coffee to a regular drip coffee. The pressure of a real espresso machine allows us to extract that coffee with a small amount of water. Espresso often has the same amount of total caffeine as a cup of drip, just packed into a smaller drink.

A double shot of espresso is actually a measure of how much ground coffee we’re using to brew. There aren’t official standards, but we call anything from 7 grams through the low teens a single shot, a 15-20 gram dose a double shot, and anything higher than that a triple.