- Okay, okay, I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking: This is clickbait.
It's not.
I will explain.
And, you might also be thinking:
Well, actually, I make beautiful espresso.
And I'm sure you do.
The short version of this is
that espresso now tastes better.
But, we should go back.
Back to maybe 15 years ago
when espresso was very beautiful.
Now, the gold standard of espresso, when I go into it,
the gold standard of how espresso should look was,
without question, David Schomer.
Maybe it was just that I was, you know,
young and impressionable at that time, but I don't think
there's really ever been a more beautiful kind of pour
than the sort of stuff David Schomer used to do.
The way the espresso sort of fell from the spouts.
It was just, it looked so good.
The way we made espresso was really,
we were trying to use a lot of visual information
and so it's not particularly surprising
that I look back at it, that we were optimizing
what we were doing for the best looking espresso
because it was how it looked
that informed the decisions we made
about whether something was good or bad.
Whether it was pouring well or badly.
There's kinda three separate things I want to talk about.
One, I want to talk about the way espresso falls
from the spouts.
That's changed.
Two, I want to talk about how it kind of looks in the cup.
The crema.
And we're gonna talk about tiger striping, too.
We'll get there.
So let's talk about the way that, you know,
the coffee pours.
How good it looks.
'Cause these days, espresso as it pours does not look
as good as it used to.
Tastes better but it doesn't look as good.
And there's a couple of reasons for this.
Ultimately, the recipe, the way that we've brewed,
has fundamentally changed.
Back in the day, grinding fresh was kind of new
and the way that the coffee was dosed was to use the basket.
To fill the basket as a way of dosing
a consistent amount of coffee.
This was way more coffee than people had used in the past.
For like that very traditional 14 gram double espresso
from Italy, we were suddenly doing
kind of 20, 22 gram doses.
Along with that, well those didn't taste very good,
if you didn't adapt the way you roasted, right?
Like, it was really hard to extract 20, 22 grams
in a normal basket, so people started to roast darker.
Now, let's talk about water for a second.
Little tiny bit of science here.
Water is a polar substance.
Each water molecule has a kind of positively charged end
and a negatively charged end.
So if you let water hang out,
it kinda wants to stick to itself.
That's what creates surface tension
and it has a property called cohesion.
Right, it wants to be attracted to itself.
It also has a property called adhesion
where it wants to stick to other things
because of this kind of magnetic charge.
Now there is something you can do
that messes with adhesion and cohesion.
That messes with water's relationship,
its magnetism to itself: And that's dissolve stuff in it.
So the more stuff that you dissolve,
the more stuff gets between the water molecules
and the harder it is for them to stick together.
Why is this relevant?
A good question.
Let's go back to looking at how an espresso brews.
So at the start when the espresso brews,
that first liquid coming through the puck
that is chock-full of soluble material.
And as a result, it's not very sticky anymore.
So that espresso falls straight down from the spout.
As your espresso progresses, you'll notice
that it starts to cling a little bit more to the spouts
and it starts to sort of arch inwards.
And that's really just saying,
how strong is the liquid flowing through.
Now, the way that we've changed brewing has gone
from massive doses in and relatively short doses out.
Which meant that almost your entire pour
was chock-full of solubles.
It still might be under-extracted at the end of it,
'cause you've just got so much coffee to extract
but it looked beautiful.
And we would often stop, sort of brewing, the moment
that it seems to be a little thinner,
that it went kind of blonde or whatever we said back then.
That was the end point.
It was purely visual.
Now that we know that actually there's still good stuff
coming out of the spouts at that point
and typically would bring lower doses again.
We had kind of shifted back from like 20, 22
down to like 16 to 18 grams.
We were also brewing more liquid in the espresso.
So it's getting bigger,
therefore, pushing more water through
and that water is gonna be weaker,
it's gonna have less dissolves stuff in it.
It's gonna cling to the spouts more.
And I kind of miss how good
old espresso used to look, right?
Like that old-school massive dose, it just looked so pretty.
It looked so good brewing.
I think, like in competitions you'd be watching people's
pours to see at what point they started to cling
to the spouts a little bit more and sort of lose
that straight beautiful drop there.
And these days, they don't drop straight down for long.
Pretty quickly they start to pull inwards
and that's just the way that we're brewing has changed.
It's changed the nature and the strength
of the liquid coming out.
So that's why, that's one of the reasons,
that espresso is no longer quite as beautiful
as it was before.
Well, one other subject,
I do wanna talk a little bit about crema.
Now, I am not the biggest fan of the taste of crema.
Like it doesn't, you know you get a spoonful that's not good
and taking it off an espresso
and drinking that without its crema is an interesting
and enjoyable little exercise.
So it's important to remember
that crema is really just a foam of the liquid below it.
It's not different or separate.
It's not special.
It's just foam, right?
And the color of that foam is pretty much related
to the color of the beverage down below.
Now, as I've said before we're pulling
ultimately weaker shots of espresso.
Better tasting, better extracted, more balanced,
more flavorsome you might argue.
Not as textured and rich and decadent but, but delicious.
Now that liquid is weaker.
And as a result if you make a foam from a paler liquid
you'll get a paler foam.
And don't forget, the color of coffee itself comes from
what are called melanoidins,
like brown byproducts of roasting.
And the darker you'll roast something,
the more of these there'll be.
The deeper, the richer the red brown you'll have.
You can't get stunningly deep red brown crema
from pretty light roasts.
It can't be done.
You haven't generated enough of those melanoidins
and those kind of compounds that give coffee its color.
Very dark roasts will produce darker, richer looking crema
and then also produce a bit more CO2.
They'll age a bit quicker, so they'll degas faster
'cause they're more brittle and that roasting process
kind of makes the whole coffee bean more porous
and so it does age a little quicker,
but fresh it will have more CO2.
In addition, if you really want to get into the old-school,
if you are still using like a little tickle of robusta
which I believe for a long time, for example David Schomer,
a little tickle of Robusta in there.
Robusta has less oil in the bean naturally
than arabica does.
About half the amount.
And oil is the enemy of foam.
If you've made meringues, you will know this to be true.
Right, like fat destroys foam
for reasons we'll maybe talk about another time.
But don't forget, robusta will give you not only more crema
but longer lasting crema.
More stable crema.
Doesn't taste good, I think, most of it.
There's better, there's worse this is not the time.
And the last thing I wanna touch upon
is what we typically call tiger stripes.
It's like a beautiful flecking across the top of the crema.
It looks very beautiful.
You feel like you've made something very beautiful
when you make an espresso like this.
Now, this whole rant actually came
from a trip I took recently to Italy.
And I pulled some shots.
And one of the shots I've pulled
of kind of local coffee there just looked very pretty.
And it reminded me that espresso doesn't really look like
this day to day anymore.
And I felt a little nostalgic.
I felt a little sad but it was also,
I was like wow maybe that's something to talk about here,
in terms of the science of coffee
and why things are the way that they are.
Now, tiger striping that's essentially just lots
of tiny piece of ground coffee trapped in the crema.
And as you brew, typically you're espresso pour
hits one side of the cup, drags the foam underneath
and it kind of pulls the remaining crema across the cup,
causing these kind of flecks to spread out as you brew.
Again, to kind of brew this way you would need to be
grinding quite a brittle coffee, so you get a lot more
of these tiny little grinds that come out at the start.
You do sometimes see them with lighter roasts
and that kind of stuff, but it's relatively rare
compared to how it used to be.
And those are a few thoughts on why modern espresso
doesn't look as good as it used to.
I'm not out here, trying to trash-talk what you make,
what you enjoy that's not the point.
And if you like the old-school style of stuff,
that's okay, too.
I'm not trying to say that it's worse.
I know I said that it tastes better now,
but it's maybe more to my tastes, I guess.
I'll hold my hands up there.
All I'm trying to say is that it's kind of interesting,
the way that modern techniques
have impacted the look of espresso.
And that maybe, you know, it's okay to be a little nostalgic
for how things used to look.
It was a very satisfying part of being a barista,
producing gorgeous-looking shots.
You don't taste most of what you make in a day,
so if it looks fantastic that does feel kind of good.
Anyway, I welcome your thoughts.
I don't really know what you're gonna say.
I'm kind of interested.
Do you think I've lost my mind?
Do you think I'm totally off the beaten track?
Have you been making espresso for a long time?
Do you feel like there's been a real shift?
Do you sometimes get sad that the best tasting espressos
don't look as good as they used to?
Let me know your thoughts.
I'll be interested to talk to you about it
in the comments down below.
As always, thank you for watching.
I hope you have a great day.