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That doesn’t mean you should be grinding beans straight out of the roaster-coffee is usually “rested” a few days in order to allow for off-gassing of CO 2, which affects brewing-but depending on how it’s packaged, you should start using the coffee within a couple of weeks of roasting and finish any opened packages quickly. Whatever you choose, freshness matters, so make sure you’re using coffee at its prime. And when a single-origin coffee (versus a blend) is well-suited to espresso, often a roaster highlights this-and it can be a fun way to discover new complexities of flavor in your brewing. You can find a lot of great approaches to coffee roasting out there, so why not try a few? You’ll discover that the best roasters strive to build coffee blends that taste balanced and pleasing in the espresso brewing process and retain their best characteristics when served with milk. The choice is up to you, and having your own setup means you can experiment. Although traditionally espresso is made with a darker roast, picking out a coffee bean strictly marketed as “espresso” isn’t necessary.
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Selecting your coffeeĮven with great gear, you can’t pull a good espresso if you don’t start with good coffee. Ideally you’ll grind coffee for each espresso right before you pull the shot, because coffee goes stale rapidly once it’s ground. The bare minimum setup you’ll need to get started brewing espresso is the machine itself (which, in the case of the Breville Infuser, comes with a portafilter and tamper already) and, whether you do the grinding yourself or not, some coffee ground correctly for espresso (a much finer grind than you may be used to for filter coffee). So I asked my colleague David if he might drop by my home testing lab and share his award-winning expertise using the beginner-friendly gear we recommend. Though I have a long coffee background myself, including not just consulting at Joe Coffee Company but researching and writing Wirecutter’s guides to coffee grinders and drip coffee makers, and serving as associate editor at coffee news website, I’ve spent nearly all of my time in the coffee industry on the drinking side of the bar. With that in mind, we enlisted David Castillo, the training and education manager at Joe Coffee Company in New York City (I also work at Joe Coffee Company as a consultant), to spend some time with the Breville Infuser (our former top-pick machine), and give us some advice on getting started. That’s why mutual intelligibility is a linguist’s (and frankly my own) favorite way of settling debates just like this: as long as the underlying meaning of a word is understood by both the speaker and listener, then there isn’t an actual issue with how it is being spoken.If you’re a coffee aficionado interested in pulling great shots at home, our review of the best espresso machine, grinder, and accessories can help you pick out a great beginner setup-but you’ll need a little practice and patience to get the hang of it. Let’s say you like the word “expresso” because you know that “espresso” is a super-speedy way of making coffee? Awesome-call it what you want then, fellow coffee lover!īottom line, there is no clear answer for what word should or could be the “proper” historical or even contemporary spelling of this word however, regardless of if you call it “espresso” or “expresso,” the barista making your favorite café beverage is going to know exactly what you are talking about next time you order that extra shot in your latte. This is where my English professor wisdom comes in to *hopefully* end this somewhat pointless debate once and for all: when dealing with any language debacle, the real answer comes down to a term called mutual intelligibility-or, put more simply, “can I still understand what someone is saying to me even though they are using a different version of the same word?”Īs we’ve mentioned in countless blog posts this year, coffee is all about your preferences at the end of the day, and the debate about the correct pronunciation of “espresso” is no different.
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