Manual Espresso

This morning, I ordered a short latte from a local Uptown Espresso. I was shocked that after the barista took my order, she did everything by hand. I watched as she ground the beans, dosed them into the portafilter and tamped them down. She attached the portafilter to the machine and timed my shots by hand. And how was the coffee? It was delicious.

I really appreciate when things are done by hand. Almost every other coffee chain I know has fully automated machines. You push a button and the machine grinds the beans, doses and tamps the grounds in the same precise way each time, and pulls shots that come out more or less exactly the same each time. The automatic method is obviously popular for lots of reasons. It enables chains like Starbucks to achieve s sense of consistency across all their stores. Whether you're walking into a Starbucks on the upper east side of Manhattan or in downtown Seattle on Pike St., you know that the beverage you order will taste exactly like the ones you've had at other Starbucks establishments. It also renders a major factor of barista training unnecessary. Pulling good, consistent espresso shots is an art, and it's a lot easier to train new employees how to push a button than it is to teach them how to time shots. This also allows them to spend more of the employee training process on other things like customer service or individual recipes (i.e. how many pumps of what goes in this or that drink). It also enables them to service more customers with a smaller staff. I've read somewhere that a single Starbucks store can serve hundreds of customers in a single hour. That wouldn't be possible without automatic espresso machines.

But still there's something that really draws me to the manual approach. On most mornings I pull my own espresso shots. I prefer my own espresso to the ones I could get at my local Peet's or Tully's or Starbucks. Do manual shots always taste better than automatic ones? Not at all. There's plenty of things that can be done wrong. I'm always trying new kinds of beans too, which means I constantly need to adjust the fineness of the grind, the pressure I apply to the tamper, and the duration of the shot. Sometimes, when getting used to new beans, the result of all my hard work doesn't even taste like coffee. But when you get it right, it makes everything worth it.

Some enthusiasts claim that the best manual shots are consistently better than their automatic counterparts. I don't know if that's necessarily true. A lot of time is spent fine-tuning the automatic machines to produce the most consistently high-quality espresso possible. Of course, there's a little bit of a tradeoff between consistency and quality, but in general, they can make decently good coffee. But then again, it's not necessarily the quality of the brew that draws me to the manual process. Like all manual processes, it's the personal aspect it introduces. You can curtail your espresso to be exactly the way you want it? Do you want a lighter brew or a heavier brew? Do you prefer it to have a hint of bitterness or would you rather shoot to extract all the aromatic flavors of the beans without the bitterness that comes toward the end of the extraction? You won't find any buttons on an automatic machine that'll let you make any of those choices. If you don't want to make those choices, it's fine. You can keep your Starbucks. But there's something about my coffee every morning that says it was made specially for me, just the way I like it. That's why manual espresso will never go out of style. Not because it's better than the automatic kind, but because it's more personal.

From Berries to Brews

Sometimes human creativity really baffles me. I've been getting into home espresso brewing recently, and one thing that I find incredibly shocking is the shear number of processes that coffee goes through between getting picked as a berry and getting brewed into a delicious drink. Generally speaking, in order to make coffee out of coffee berries, you must:

1)pick the berries
2)separate the beans from the pulp
3)dry the beans
4)roast the beans
5)grind the beans
6)pour hot water over the ground beans to extract the flavor of the grounds into the brew.

The thing that's really interesting about this is that without any of these 6 steps you don't end up with coffee in the end. It makes me really wonder how humans ever discovered coffee. Did someone just look at a coffea plant one day and say, "I wonder what it would taste like if I took some of those relatively bland-tasting berries, extract and dry their seeds and roast them and gridn them up and brew them in hot water..."?

The vexing issue here is that the complicated process of coffee making does not lend itself well to discovery by parts. In many other areas of science and engineering, new discoveries are made on the shoulders of older, well-established, and useful discoveries. Think of the modern automobile. Cars weren't invented overnight. Someone discovered the wheel long before anyone was thinking about combustion engines. So there were intermediary steps. First, carts with wheels. Then horse-drawn carriages, then motorcars, then cars with automatic transmissions, power stearing wheels, alarm systems, air bags, and all the other modern luxuries. The point is, at any point between the initial invention of the basic cart and the development of the modern automobile, each step was its own finished product, with its own intrinsic utility.

This is not the same with coffee production. Getting halfway there doesn't get you a finished product at all. Say one person discoveres how to de-pulp and dry coffee beans. That's not a finished product! It's not something that others can say, "wow, that's good, but I wonder if we can make it better." With things like the coffee process, it's all or nothing. Either you end up with coffee or you end up with something totally useless, like dry beans. This makes the entires process much less probable to be discovered, because it's all or nothing. There's no half way.

It makes me wonder what other potential delicious bevarages are you to be discovered. There are countless varieties of beans and seends to try similar processes on! After all, who would have expected that something as delicious as coffee would come from something as unsuspected as a bland-tasting cherry-looking berry? It's entirely likely that there are more such discoveries to be made.

That's the thing about the human creative spark. It enables us to think of the most uncanny ideas that end up being totally rewarding!