Harts of Stur Kitchen issue 09, spring 2019 | Page 53
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Instant Expert: Espresso
Everything you need to know about espresso
A good espresso should taste like this
know that – if you’re at home with an espresso machine
and a grinder, you’ll do fine adjustments. You can’t really
advise on the size, it’s just experience and timing it. Start
timing your yield – you’ve got to achieve your 36ml in
28-32 seconds. People who get into it get their
stopwatches out!”
“Espresso is obviously a short drink, but it’s more intense
than a normal coffee. Your dream espresso is going to
be sweet, well balanced and have some fruit flavours. It
would also have a nice crema [the thin layer of foam at
the top of a coffee]. If you’re using old beans, you’ll get a
stale coffee and you wouldn’t get so much crema.
“If you over extract the coffee – if you went on for 40
seconds – the crema could be quite dark and have
a tendency for more bitterness. So, the longer the
extraction, the more bitter it is likely to be, and the
shorter, the more acidic. An under-extracted coffee – if
it, say, took 20 seconds, it could be quite light and watery
tasting, and too acidic.”
The importance of stretching milk
“If you’ve got a steam arm on your machine, this is
probably the most tricky part of making a coffee. It is a
two-stage approach – the stretching process draws air
into the milk, so the top of the nozzle should be just out of
the milk. Once you’ve stretched it as much as you want,
you then want to texture it, where you’re spinning the
milk and giving it a nice creamy texture.
“For a cappuccino, for example, you’re incorporating
bubbles by stretching, essentially increasing the volume
of milk by sucking a little air in. Then you put the tip of
the steam wand deeper into the milk and you just want
to spin the milk and that’s called texturing, which is very
important because it’s like whipping the milk up.”
The importance of good beans
“What a roaster is trying to achieve is to make sure you
get that nice fruit favour cutting through the milk. So, the
slight danger is losing the interest once you add the milk,
particularly with speciality coffee.
“At Moonroast, we only roast speciality coffee that’s
graded over 80 out of 100. You’ve got speciality coffee
and everything under that is commodity coffee, so
when you’re buying premium arabica speciality coffee,
what you don’t want to do is roast too dark and create a
‘roasty’ coffee flavour. You’re trying to draw out different
characteristics of the bean. Getting the roast profile and
the extraction right on the machine is what you’re trying
to achieve to get the fruity, sweetness balance. If you
roast dark you get a one-dimensional flavour.
“A lot of our coffees are ethically sourced from
smallholder farmers, and they’re being very well
rewarded for quality. Because it’s scored over 80, it’s
going to be good stuff – that’s our assurance that it’s
minimum base quality. If someone is buying coffee
that’s not speciality grade, they don’t quite know what
they’re getting.”
Buy a good grinder
“If you want to improve your coffee making at home, buy
a grinder. It’s practically impossible to make an espresso
with pre-ground coffee because the grind size won’t be
right for your machine. Some would say that a grinder is
more important than an espresso machine, but it needs to
be a burr grinder because what you’re trying to achieve
is an even grind. If you buy a cheap grinder you’ll end up
with big particles and small particles, so the extraction
isn’t going to be very good.”
How to choose the right coffee machine
“I would always go for manual, because then you’re
in total control. With a separate grinder, you can
adjust the grind and extraction time. Bean to cup is
a little more automated so the grind is incorporated
into the machine, but you should still be able to adjust
the grind and you should still be stretching the milk.
“On a manual machine, it takes time to stretch the
milk with the steamer, but some of the more fancy
bean to cup machines will do the milk for you.
“Capsule machines probably work out more
expensive per cup, but it’s easy. If you’re interested
in coffee, with micro roasters popping up all over the
country, there’s a good chance that someone will have
one nearby. So get it freshly roasted and you’ll be able
to discover different coffees, different varieties and
different countries. There’s more room to explore
coffees with a bean to cup or a manual machine.”
How to store beans
“The element that deteriorates the beans quickest is
oxygen. As long as there’s no oxygen in contact with the
bean at all, you’d ideally use a bean within a month, but
up to two months really. It’s really a matter of storing
the beans in a cool, dry place – it doesn’t have to be the
fridge. We put the roast date rather than the best before
on our bags, to give it a shelf life of three months after
roast date, but it’s really at its peak after four or five
weeks. If you buy ground coffee it does go off quicker.”
The importance of perfect grinding
“There’s a sweet spot when you’re trying to get the grind
right. You’re trying to achieve this perfect extraction – if
the beans are ground too coarsely, the water is going to
come through too quickly and you’re going to get a thin,
tasteless coffee. If it’s too fine, it’s going to slow the water
coming through and you’ll potentially get a bitter coffee.
The humidity in the air changes things – every day is
different, so you might have to do tiny adjustments on
your grinder to achieve perfect extraction. You get to
What else do you need?
“You do need a tamper as the tamping part of making
your espresso is important. When you’re forming
your shot, it needs to be level because otherwise, the
water goes down the side. How we recommend it in
our barista training is that you put the pressure of
mashing potato on it. You also need the right-sized
milk jug.”
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