Espresso is better with fewer beans, more coarsely ground

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/27/espresso-is-better-with-fewer.html

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Reducing your beans to a fine saw dust is never a good idea.

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Ah, yes, because the Brits are so well known for their coffee.

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I have witnessed first hand the [Brits] English consuming coffee products.

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And how does that work? All our coffee grounds go out to the garden.

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He might mean we can grow, ship and store fewer beans

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This seems like one of those things that would have been easily found in trial and error early in the history of Expresso. Unless there is something about the new machines that is different from earlier machines or something like that…

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It sounds like they’re not grinding them much coarser - just a bit. They’re not talking about a drip grind, or a perk grind. So yes, that could have been missed by earlier experimenters not making such an analytical study.

The savings on beans would be tiny per cup, less than a bean probably, but it would be big cumulatively.

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If you buy relatively pricey espresso-ground coffee, it has just-about visible granules, but if people are grinding their own coffee and assume that they need it as fine as possible, they may well be going for a much finer, flour-like consistency.

So when they say you get better coffee from a coarser grind, the question is “relative to what?”

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And if one ends up with an equal amount of caffeine, it does seem the right thing all around.

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I would think not only does that need to be defined but also the how uniform and consistent the grind is.
Would putting columns of coarser grind than the rest have a similar effect?
Ok hand packing espresso of different sizes in different parts of the filter may increase labour costs.

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I travel regularly, and London has some of the best coffee in the world, particularly if you appreciate brewed coffee.

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I also wonder about the particle geometry. A bunch of polyhedra might pack more efficiently (and so be less permeable) than a bunch of spheres, for instance. If the particles were shaped so that they always pack inefficiently, like those concrete land-reclamation thingies, then making them smaller would always give better extraction. Obviously you can’t completely control the shape of the particles but different practical grinders might give different results for the same coarseness.

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If the coverage I saw of this last week is accurate, they did the study with some very well regarded coffee shops in Portland, Oregon.

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Yeah, but it doesn’t matter how it tastes if you’re gonna use it for a coffee enema.

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FAKE BREWS!

Actually trying new ways to conserve coffee is a good thing.

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So…espresso grind, with a burr grinder for consistency. Is this news? That’s the way Alton Brown taught me how to make espresso back in 2007.

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better with fewer beans

Sounds like coffee-homeopathy, to me…

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They seem to be fans of instant coffee, while they like to sneer at Americans for our bad taste and habits with tea.

Having worked at a few coffee shops i have to say that the amount of coffee doesn’t matter as much but how compact one is making the coffee grounds when tamping down. If you over tamp it then you’re not getting a good pull, there’s no need to make the grounds more coarse. Coarser grounds also gets you less extraction of all the oils which is critical to good espresso. If you also add significantly less grounds you over-extract which gets you worse espresso.

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The premise of this study is strange. Most (good) baristas know that more fine + more beans doesn’t necessarily yield the best result, either for taste or intensity. The general rule is 9 bars of constant pressure, 25-30 seconds of brew for a double. Depending on the amount of coffee (double is usually 18 grams of coffee), as long as your grind is consistent, you adjust your grind until you hit somewhere in that range (many will say 27 grams liquid in 27 seconds). This grind is never the courseness you see in pre-ground coffee advertised as “espresso”.

Consistency is always going to be a problem as there are variables you can’t control: age of the bean, how it was roasted, particularities of the bean). It always comes down to domain knowledge as well as working with the controllable factors, adjusting your grind until you get something that works.

Of course, without a good machine and grinder it’s very hard to hit that well-balanced enjoyable new-wave espresso anyways, so whatever. :wink:

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