Espresso, Step by Step
Espresso in the home can be a lot of things: a drink brewed on a stovetop moka pot, a shot pulled from a steam-powered $75 Walmart devices, or in the case of this how to, an authentic, 9BAR powered double shot of roughly 50-60ml of liquid and foam crema in a tiny demitasse cup.
Time Needed: 3 minutes
Equipment Cost $ 440
Necessary Supplies
Necessary Tools
Double Shot Espresso Steps
Everything Clean and Ready
Great espresso happens when everything you use is fresh and of good quality. Coffee roasted within the last two weeks. Fresh, clean and filtered water. Clean grouphead and dispersion screen (that screen up where your portafilter locks into). Clean portafilter.
Preheat Everything
Make sure everything you’re using to make your espresso is hot: the machine (run some blank shots through it to heat up the grouphead and portafilter), and your cup. It’s only going to hold about 50-60ml of liquid and crema (about 40-45g of weight), so it needs help to prevent the espresso from cooling down too quick.
Grind Just Before Brewing
One of the keys to great espresso is grinding your coffee literally seconds before you have it in the espresso machine, ready to brew a shot. One of the key elements of great espresso is the role of carbon dioxide (CO2) gas; it helps transport non water soluble taste and aroma elements into the cup and helps develop crema. Those fresh coffee beans store a lot of it, but roughly 80% of the stored CO2 evacuates from the coffee within 2 minutes after it is ground. You don’t want that CO2 in the air; you want it an active part of your beverage. Keep the time between grinder and shot pull short.
Dose 16-19g of Coffee
Depending on your machine, dose out your normal double shot volume of coffee. Once we dialed in this Barista Express, we found 18 grams was a good dose at about a 4 setting on the grinder dial.
Level the Coffee Bed
Some grinders back load or front load the ground coffee into the filter basket. Some put out excessive clumps. Get to know your grinder, and deal with this potential pitfall to great espresso: coffee must be distributed in the filter basket evenly, before you tamp. If your grinder “backloads” the ground coffee, like this Barista Express does, use the side of your finger to move the coffee forward and pack it down a bit into the basket.
Optional: Apply WDT
A better way to level out a clumpy, uneven bed of coffee is to use a WDT device (as seen here) to fluff up the bed and declump the coffee. We have a full guide on this method.
Tamp the Coffee
Once you’re satisfied with your quick levelling of the bed of coffee, tamp it down with your preferred espresso tamper. We’re using the Express’ included magnetic tamper to do this. How much pressure you press down with is not nearly as important as making sure your compacted bed of coffee is perfectly level, 360 degrees around the basket. Use your thumb and forefinger, like in this photo, to rotate the tamper to ensure it is level.
Lock the Portafilter into Machine
Very carefully, without knocking or jarring the portafilter, lock it into place in your espresso machine. If you happen to ding or knock it against the grouphead, you have probably unsettled your hard work in levelling and tamping down the coffee. Treat it with kid gloves when inserting into the machine and locking it into position.
Pull the Shot
Once the portafilter is in place, immediately start pulling the shot. On a lever machine, that means pulling the lever down to cock the spring (or up to open the brew chamber, if using a La Pavoni). On a manual, semi auto or automatic machine (like this Barista Express) that means pushing the brew button of flicking the lever switch. If your machine has any kind of preinfusion mode, make use of it – it improves espresso.
Watch the Shot Develop
As the shot pulls, watch it carefully; watch for a syrupy like consistency to the streams of espresso brewing out. Watch for colours. Watch for things like the streams twirling and dancing about (if that happens, something’s wrong with how you packed the coffee). Observe, and detect any defects with how the shot is pulling.
End the Double Shot
We’re using a scale here for demonstration purposes, but I’m actually not a fan of “exactness” and stopping shots at exactly a predetermined volume (or weight). I like watching the shot progress, and I sometimes end a shot once I see evidence of blonding or thinning out of the espresso streams from the spouts. If you hit 40-45g of espresso brewed on your doubles and the shot still looks like this at the end, then you know things were working well. If you see it blonding and thinning earlier, no crime in stopping the shot before your target volume is hit. After all, taste is what’s important here.
EspressoBackground and Theory
Espresso is, in my opinion, the ultimate expression of what roasted coffee has to offer. It is the most concentrated format of coffee that you can currently brew. It is extremely demanding as a brewing method.
The brew method is riddled with extremes and potential chaos. Think about this: you’re throwing 90-95C water at ultra fine granules of coffee packed into a compact, tight space, with 150 psi of pressure, nearly instantly.
Think about this too: your home plumbing faucets deliver water out of the spout at about 40-60psi. Your espresso machine can deliver it at almost 3 times that pressure. Thank goodness it’s all contained in that tight space known as a filter basket, dispersion screen, grouphead, and portafilter.
We are a firm believer of the Italian mantra of the “four ‘Ms'” when it comes to espresso: all four of these elements are equally important: mana, or yourself and your good “hand”; macchina, or the espresso machine, well tuned and clean; macinadosatore, or the grinder, which must be up to the task of grinding for espresso; and the miscela (blend), which stresses having great, fresh coffee. I’d add a fifth: good water. Good filtered water is absolutely crucial to great espresso.
Here’s some additional tips and discussion.
Temperature and Vessels
We’ve come a long, long way since two decades ago, when we had to settle for espresso machines that had as much as 10F (about 5-7C) variance on brewing temperatures, shot to shot. Today, you can easily find PIDs (Proportional, Integral, Derivative control – a sciencey, lab-by electronic tool for precisely controlling temperatures) inside $400 espresso machines delivering brewing temperatures to within 1F. But you can still make due with a machine that doesn’t have PID controls or other precise temperature controls.
Look at the shot in the photo above. That’s a shot pull on a 1998 Micro Casa a Leva piston lever espresso machine from Elektra. That shot was pulled 3 months before this guide was written. Those results are achieved because of one thing: experience with the machine.
Experience (and testing) to know where the machine’s sweet spot on temperatures is. It literally took maybe 500 shot pulls on that machine to get to a comfort zone where I knew how it operated enough to know how and when to pull the shot.
Temperature is also important in another area: your cups and portafilter. Espresso is a tiny drink: 30ml per single (max), or 50-60ml (about 45g in weight) per double. Liquid at 93C will cool down very fast at those volumes when surrounded by things like a barely warm portafilter, ambient air, and a cool porcelain cup. I can’t stress enough how important it is to pre-heat your espresso cup, and make sure your portafilter (and grouphead) are up to operating temperatures.
Speaking of the cup. Please, please stick to porcelain. It is the best “common” material ever designed for holding espresso or coffee for that matter.
Yes, we used a clear cup in our how to photos, but that cup is the illy crystal nude espresso cup, and singular in both it’s ability to retain heat and present the perfect shape to receive the espresso; the cups are rare and used in this How To to demonstrate the crema. If they were readily available, I’d recommend that illy nude cup because, in my opinion, it’s the best espresso cup ever made.
If you’re looking for what we consider the best espresso cups ever made, look for the standard Illy porcelain cups (usually with the illy logo on them). They are pretty much perfect, and sometimes you can find a set of 2 or 4 on eBay for as little as $5 a cup or less. Or you can buy them direct from Illy for just $8 each including saucer.
Illy Espresso Cups
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On “Grinding Fresh”
One of the key elements to great espreso is using freshly roasted coffee (absolute optimum for espresso is 4-6 days after roast, but anything less than 2 weeks old is good), and grinding literally seconds before you pull your shot. If you can be finished grinding, and have the portafilter locked and loaded in your espresso machine within 60 seconds of each other, you’re doing good.
One of the main reasons why this is important is carbon dioxide (CO2). Freshly roasted coffee has a lot of it. When you smell the aroma of great coffee when grinding, you can thank CO2 for that: it’s being released from the coffee through the grinding action, and carrying with it aromas and fragrances. Problem is, if you’re smelling it, it’s no longer in the actual ground coffee; it’s in the air, floating around. You don’t want that. You want it in your espresso!
When you grind fresh coffee, roughly 80% of it’s stored CO2 is released within 120 seconds. CO2 that would otherwise be transporting non-soluble elements from the ground coffee into your cup. CO2 that would be helping to form crema and create the emulsions formed during the espresso brewing process. In short, you want that CO2 to contribute to your cup. You can make it so by being as fast as possible between grinding and locking your portafilter into the espresso machine, and pulling your shot.
Levelling the Bed of Coffee
This is a mistake I see even seasoned professional baristas make all the time: they go through tons of care dosing their coffee out, weighing everything, making sure everything is fresh, and then when they tamp down the coffee, it’s off balanced to one side… even perhaps by just a small amount (millimeters).
This off balance leads to extraction problems: there’s literally less coffee (and thus less resistance) on one side of the puck of coffee. Water under pressure will always take the path of least resistance, which leads to under and over developed espresso shot pulls – parts of the coffee will be over extracted, and other parts will be woefully under extracted.
You can completely up your home espresso game by making sure your tamp is 100% level, all around.
There’s another way to improve your shots of espresso even further: apply what’s called the Weiss Distribution Technique, or WDT to it. You can do it with a simple paperclip, or buy a $15-$20 tool that does the job. Here’s our full guide on this method.
Scales
Stirring and Crema
Lastly, a topic that James Hoffmann helped stir up about half a decade ago: is crema bad? Should you remove it from your espresso before drinking? Should you stir it in to the drink before trying? I’m going to leave this up to your personal preference, but as a home coffee enthusiast, you should definitely experiment. Try tasting crema on it’s own. Try scooping it out of your espresso before drinking. And try stirring it in and drinking. Find the way you like to enjoy espresso and go with it. Well, that concludes our Espresso How To. We do plan on doing a full masterclass and tome on the art of making espresso at a later date on CoffeeGeek. This How To is designed to give you the quick and easy method for making great espresso, with a bit of discussion afterwards, but there is so much more to say, don’t you think?
