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Skilled baristas know that achieving the perfect complex flavor profile for a delectable shot of espresso is as much art as science. Get it wrong, and the resulting espresso can taste too bitter or sourly acidic rather than being a perfect mix of each. Now, as outlined in a new paper in the journal Matter, an international team of scientists has devised a mathematical model for brewing the perfect cup, over and over, while minimizing waste.
[...]There's actually an official industry standard for brewing espresso, courtesy of the Specialty Coffee Association
[...]most coffee shops don't follow this closely, typically using more coffee, while the brewing machines allow baristas to configure water pressure, temperature, and other key variables to their liking.
[...]"Most people in the coffee industry are using fine-grind settings and lots of coffee beans to get a mix of bitterness and sour acidity that is unpredictable and irreproducible," said Hendon, a computational chemist at the University of Oregon.
[...]the group's experiments, revealed that if coffee is ground too finely, it can clog the coffee bed, thereby reducing extraction yield. It's also a big factor in the variability in taste. The researchers concluded that there are better methods for maximizing extraction yield, such as using fewer beans and coarser grinds with a bit less water. And the Specialty Coffee Association might be interested to hear that brew time is largely irrelevant.
[...]"Though there are clear strategies to reduce waste and improve reproducibility, there is no obvious optimal espresso point," said Hendon. "There is a tremendous dependency on the preferences of the person producing the coffee; we are elucidating the variables that they need to consider if they want to better navigate the parameter space of brewing espresso."
[...]"The real impact of this paper is that the most reproducible thing you can do is use less coffee," said Hendon. "If you use 15 grams instead of 20 grams of coffee and grind your beans coarser, you end up with a shot that runs really fast but tastes great. Instead of taking 25 seconds, it could run in 7 to 14 seconds. But you end up extracting more positive flavors from the beans, so the strength of the cup is not dramatically reduced. Bitter, off-tasting flavors never have a chance to make their way into the cup."
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/the-math-of-brewing-a-better-espresso/
(Score: 1) by evilcam on Friday January 24 2020, @03:11AM
Full disclosure: I consider myself a coffee wanker, and I really don't mind the bitterness of an espresso...
I've got a relatively expensive (mid-high end machine) lever machine (La Pavoni Europiccola) paired with a decent grinder (Rancilio Rocky) and I find that if I have a coarse grind, I really struggle to get a crema when pulling a shot.
Recently I've tried to eradicate burnt coffee and introduce more consistency into my morning brew by weighing the amount of ground coffee that goes into the basket and even busting out the bathroom scales to measure how much pressure I'm tamping with. I've found that finer grind (#4 on my grinder) with a medium tamp (like 10-15kg) and 12g of coffee is giving good results (i.e. 2-3mm) in terms of crema, but still no where near the 15mm I'd get from a cafe here in Australia. If I want a thick, creamy top, then I have to up the dosage and the tamp pressure to the point where I can barely pull the lever doown and I end up with a horribly burnt coffee...
Anyways I find it interesting that TFA or the linked paper doesn't seem to mention crema at all... Maybe I'm just a clueless snob?