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Espresso: Ultimate Coffee, Second Edition

Espresso: Ultimate Coffee, Second Edition

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Espresso: Ultimate Coffee, Second Edition

332 pages
3 heures
Oct 15, 2013



Oct 15, 2013

À propos de l'auteur

Kenneth Davids is one of the main figures in the home coffee-roasting revival, and writes for a number of coffee-industry publications and web-sites. He is the author of Home Coffee Roasting. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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  • Many semi-automatic machines incorporate a computer chip and control panel, which regulate the flow of water through the coffee to produce anywhere from a single corto or short espresso to a double lungo or long espresso.

  • Depending on the strength of the local water pressure, such machines could exert considerably more than the 1½ atmospheres generated by steam pressure machines.

  • Turkish-style coffee cuisines, to serve coffee without a proper covering of froth is a sign of culinary impotence, bad manners, or both.

Aperçu du livre

Espresso - Kenneth Davids




Some years back I realized that espresso cuisine was definitely established in America when Dave’s Coffee Shop in Oakland, California, situated across the street from two automobile dealers and next to a store selling floor coverings, put up a large sign indicating that it too, along with every other place in town, finally served espresso (spelled correctly, with an s), thus assuring that the nearby automobile salesmen and high school students, not to mention motorists on the long, dry run between caffès in downtown Oakland and Berkeley, need no longer be deprived of their cappuccino or caffè latte.

This is a book that attempts to demystify espresso in all of its varied incarnations: from the purist’s short pull to the shopping mall cuisine of chocolate-almond caffè lattes. Espresso cuisine is mysterious not only because it is produced by large, complex machines that make locomotivelike noises, but also because it is a relatively new alternative coffee tradition to the American cuisine of medium-roasted, light-bodied filter coffee. And because it is a different tradition, it brings with it other culinary procedures, other institutions, other rituals.

In the following pages I’ve tried to respond to most of the questions that might be asked about espresso: questions about its technical aspects, its history, its mythology, its culture, and above all, how to do whatever you want to do with it at home. I’ve attempted to give clear and complete advice about all aspects of producing good home espresso cuisine, while adding enough espresso history, fact, and myth to bring the procedures to life.

The Espresso Generation

My own involvement with espresso, at least in what might be called a professional sense, goes back to the time in my life when I nursed a cranky old Cimbali espresso machine in a caffè I co-owned and managed in Berkeley, California. Subsequently I sold the caffè and wrote a book on coffee, which is now in its fifth edition: Coffee: A Guide to Buying, Brewing, and Enjoying. But espresso was not an afterthought in my personal coffee history. In fact, it started my coffee history. Since my experience is in many ways typical of my generation of coffee drinkers, it might be worth pursuing briefly.

Like many Americans who came of age in the early 1960s, I did not grow up drinking coffee. The only pressing choice I faced was whether to drink Pepsi or Coca-Cola. Coffee was sourish brown stuff drunk for unknown reasons by people over thirty, presumably while they occupied themselves with other peculiar middle-aged activities, like watching Ed Sullivan, listening to Frank Sinatra, and petting their cocker spaniels.

"Do You Like Coffee?"

The first inkling I had that there might be something worthwhile to the beverage was during my first college-student trip to Europe. While hitchhiking from France to Italy, I was picked up by a ruddy-faced Italian doctor. When we reached the Italian side of the border, he turned, squinted at me, drew himself up, and intoned grandly: "Do you like coffee?" The well-traveled reader will understand the length and sonorous authority of the vowels sounding in that question.

I responded that I wasn’t sure. Whereupon the doctor literally skidded to a stop in front of the next espresso bar (actually the first espresso bar, since we had just entered Italy), strode up to the counter, ordered two espressos, dumped several spoonfuls of sugar in his, muddled them, and drank the results, all in about the time that it took me to follow him in from the car.

I didn’t much care for that first dark little cup, but somewhere between Genoa and Florence I learned, like most Americans do, to order a cappuccino, and from there progressed and regressed through the rest of the carefully modulated drinks of the Italian espresso cuisine, from milky latte macchiato to the corto espresso, barely enough rich, heavy, creamy espresso to cover the bottom of a demitasse. Along the way I learned to stand properly with one elbow on the bar, stare at the passing Fiats while downing my espresso drink in several swallows, then replace the cup on the saucer with the proper authoritative clack. Above all I learned to love the peculiar bittersweet richness of espresso drinks, which rings on one’s taste-buds like a delicious dark bellclap, a sort of musical accompaniment to the lingering resonance of the caffeine.

On my return to the United States I discovered the Italian-American caffè, that more leisurely, spacious throwback to an Italy before the advent of the espresso bar, and began to drink my cappuccinos in places like the Caffè Reggio in Manhattan, the Caffè Mediterraneum in Berkeley, and the Caffè Trieste in San Francisco. Caffès became my true home. Because most of them were across the street from a bookstore, I had everything I needed in life clustered around my temporarily rented marbletop table: books, newspapers, espresso coffee, sympathetic friends, plus an occasional sandwich. I recall spending long, fruitless hours in towns with neither Italians nor caffès, driving around looking for a proper cappuccino and a proper place to drink it. When I taught at the University of Hawaii for a year, I ended up learning not only to make my own cappuccino but roast my own coffee as well, since in those years there was not a single dark-roasted coffee bean on the entire island of Oahu, aside from the ones I roasted myself in a frying pan in my tin-roofed bungalow in Kaneohe.

Given that history, it perhaps was inevitable that I would be drawn to opening my own caffè, which I eventually did, and writing, first a book about coffee generally, and then a book on espresso in particular.

Espresso Thanks

In the course of that writing I have run up an enormous collective debt to those involved in the art and business of coffee and espresso.

My thanks first to those individuals and businesses, particularly the Victoria Arduino company, the publishers of William Ukers’ All About Coffee, and BE-MA Editrice, publishers of Ambrogio Fumagalli’s Macchine da Caffè, or permitting me to make use of illustrations from their publications.

When I turn from businesses to individuals the list of those to whom I am indebted grows much longer. In fact, impossibly long. All I can do is name a few individuals whose input was particularly crucial in the making of the two editions of this book.

I would like to particularly thank Bob Barker, who read through the entire typescript of the first edition and made many valuable suggestions; collector Ambrogio Fumagalli of Milan; Christopher and John Cara of Thomas Cara, Ltd.; Don Holly and Ted Lingle of the Specialty Coffee Association of America; Sherri Miller of Miller & Associates; Kevin Knox of Allegro Coffee; the coffee cupper and pundit George Howell; Bruce Milletto of Bellissimo Coffee Education Group; Jim Reynolds of Peet’s Coffee & Tea; Don Schoenholt of Gillies Coffee; Lindsey Bolger of Batdorf & Bronson; Carl Staub of Agtron; and I had better stop there or the publisher will be forced to add another signature to the book.

To those individuals I would add the numerous others who assisted me in the research for the several editions of Coffee: A Guide to Buying, Brewing & Enjoying and for Home Coffee Roasting: Romance & Revival.

I consulted several useful books during the course of assembling this one, in particular Ambrogio Fumagalli’s Macchine da Caffè; Ian Bersten’s Coffee Floats, Tea Sinks; Edward and Joan Bramah’s Coffee Makers, 300 Years of Art & Design; Francesco and Riccardo Illy’s Coffee to Espresso; the Italian version of Felipe Ferre’s Il Caffè; Ralph Hattox’s Coffee and Coffeehouses, The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East; the Italian Istituto Internazionale Assaggiatori Caffè’s Espresso Tasting; Andrea Illy and R. Viani’s Espresso Coffee: The Chemistry of Quality; and Mariarosa Schiaffino’s Le Ore del Caffè and Cioccolato & Cioccolatini. Finally, the works of Michael Sivitz and William Ukers continue to be invaluable.

The notes and records of the ongoing saga of coffee and coffee culture recorded in Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, Fresh Cup, and other coffee industry magazines were constantly useful, as were the publications of the Specialty Coffee Association of America.

Finally, I am delighted to have an opportunity to thank my original editor, Annette Gooch, and my current editor, Keith Kahla; my agents, Richard Derus and Claudia Menza, and illustrator Michael Surles.

A concluding word of gratitude to those many professionals and enthusiasts in the United States, Italy, and Latin America whose insight has enriched and enlivened my view of espresso, even though I may have lost their cards or misplaced my scribbles on the backs of product literature. The achievements of this book are owing in great part to those who assisted me; the mistakes are mine alone.



At the level at which we genuinely live life, every reader of this book will have a different definition of espresso. For some, that definition may be a long-developed acquaintance with the beverage, an accumulation of happy memories of caffès and tinkering with home machines, of frothed milk and crema. For others espresso may mean a single experience with a caffè latte taken at an outdoor espresso stand during a vacation, or a couple of cappuccinos drunk while on a trip to Italy. Like coffee itself, espresso is as much an experience caught up in the intimate textures of our lives as it is a beverage.

Yet even when we attempt to define espresso in more detached fashion, there still appear to be many overlapping definitions, rather than a single, all-inclusive one.


A definition of espresso along technical lines is perhaps least ambiguous: Espresso is coffee brewed from beans roasted medium to dark brown, with the brewing accomplished by hot water forced (or pressed) through a bed of finely ground, densely compacted coffee at a pressure of over 9 atmospheres, or nine times the normal pressure exerted by the earth’s atmosphere. The resulting heavy-bodied, aromatic, bittersweet beverage is often combined with milk that has been heated and aerated by having steam run through it until the milk is hot and covered by a head of froth.



Defining espresso culturally and historically is more problematic. The taste for a dark, heavy, intense coffee, sweetened and drunk out of little cups, is obviously much older than the espresso machine itself, and may stretch back as far as the first coffeehouses in Cairo, Egypt, established during the early fifteenth century. On the other hand, technology (and the imagery of technology) is also obviously an important element of espresso culture. Although all coffee making lends itself to technological tinkering, no other coffee culture has applied technology to coffee making with quite the passion as the Italians have to espresso. The word espresso itself suggests custom brewing, as in brewed expressly for you, as well as direct, rapid, nonstop, as in express train. Not only has technology been applied enthusiastically to the actual process of brewing espresso, but the imagery of technology, the idea of modernity and speed, also turns up as a major element in espresso’s cultural symbolism. See the famous Victoria Arduino poster from the 1920s here, for example.

So culturally and historically we have a paradox. On the one hand, espresso as a general taste in coffee drinking goes back to the very beginnings of coffee as a public beverage. On the other, Italian espresso culture has refined that taste through a technology that flaunts its modernity.

When we turn our attention to the United States, a historical and cultural definition of espresso might emphasize still another set of connotations. Rather than being associated with modernity and a dynamic urbanism, espresso in America has become identified with various alternative cultures, from Europeanized sophisticates nostalgically evoking tradition, to intellectual rebels attacking it.


Espresso also can be defined as a kind of coffee cuisine. For example, mainstream American coffee cuisine emphasizes the bottomless cup: large, repeated servings of usually brisk-tasting, light-bodied coffees prepared by the filter method, often taken without milk or sweetener. Espresso cuisine, on the other hand, emphasizes smaller servings of heavier-bodied, richer coffee, brewed on demand rather than in batches, usually drunk sweetened, and often combined with frothed milk and other garnishes and flavorings.

In Italy the classic espresso cuisine emphasizes simplicity: perfect short pulls of espresso and a handful of exquisitely modulated combinations of coffee and milk. Predictably, in North America a more freewheeling, idiosyncratic, bigger approach has evolved. At one extreme the Seattle-style espresso cuisine rears its many-flavored head: wide open, innovative, the basic themes of espresso and milk exuberantly elaborated with flavored syrups, ice, a score of garnishes, and seemingly endless refinements involving the milk (1 percent, 2 percent, 4 percent, skim, soy, eggnog …). At the other is beatnik espresso, the original Italian-American cuisine, the espresso of storefront shops in old Italian neighborhoods and seedy artists’ caffès. This cuisine resembles the classic Italian, but the coffee is darker, the servings are bigger, and the taste is rawer. Between the two are a few, very few, caffès that conscientiously pursue the classic Italian ideal. The Cuban tradition of southern Florida constitutes still another, though more regional, American espresso cuisine.

Finally, there is still another American cuisine, which I would like to dub espresso manqué, and which is all of the misinterpretations and misunderstandings of espresso being committed in the United States today thrown together, including watery, bitter, overextracted coffee, scalded milk, meringuelike heads of froth, all presented to the background flatulence of canned whipped cream being sprayed on top of the drink to distract us from the grim reality underneath.


Finally, espresso can be defined in terms of the places it has helped create and that helped create it: the caffès, cafés, coffeehouses, espresso bars, and espresso carts of the world. For espresso is a quintessentially public coffee. The technological sophistication of the espresso system only could have evolved in the context of public establishments with enough coffee drinkers to support the expense involved in maintaining such large and complex coffee-making equipment. Thus espresso and the espresso machine have come to constitute the spiritual and aesthetic heart of a variety of subtly different institutions, including the Italian-American caffè, the espresso bar, the American coffeehouse, and now the Seattle-style espresso cart and stand.


I’m drawn to add still one more definition, something along contemporary sociological lines. For it appears that fancy coffees generally, and espresso cuisine in particular, have assumed a rather unique role in contemporary American life. It is a role that has led some commentators to characterize coffee (and caffeine) as the nice vice of the millennium, the one pleasantly consciousness-altering substance that has escaped (perhaps narrowly) from the censure heaped by a health-conscious establishment on alcohol, tobacco, and their various illegal alternatives. Certainly the current crop of college-age youth, a generation I find particularly attractive, has adopted coffee as a beverage and ritual of choice. Fifties-style coffeehouses are booming, and T-shirts and lapel buttons surface wherever younger people congregate, half seriously, half ironically celebrating coffee. Espresso Yourself, says one; Coffee Is God proclaims another.

So is everything else, the Buddhist might reply, but for some of us a particularly good case can be made for our favorite drink.

A contemporary espresso cart, an increasingly familiar sight in North American shopping malls, downtown streets, and even gasoline stations.



Delivery of a tiny, aromatic cup of espresso or a perfectly balanced cappuccino depends on an integrated brewing system, including machine, grinder, and accessories. The various elements of a complete commercial espresso system are illustrated on the next page.

The machine. The machine pictured here is a simple semi-automatic pump machine. The operator or barista dispenses ground coffee into a metal filter fixed inside a filter holder, clamps the filter and filter holder into the machine, and presses a button to start and stop the flow of brewing water through the coffee. For illustrated descriptions of other types of machines, including manual piston and fully automatic, see here.

The housing (1) of the machine conceals a water reservoir, a pump to push the brewing water through the coffee, apparatus for heating and measuring the brewing water, and a boiler in which the water used to create steam for milk frothing is held and heated. The apparatuses that heat water for brewing and for making steam are separate, since the ideal water temperature for brewing is somewhat lower than the temperature required to produce steam.

The group (from Italian gruppo) or brew head (2) is where the filter holder or portafilter (3) and metal filter (4) clamp, and where the actual brewing takes place. See the cutaway illustration. The pump inside the housing delivers heated water through a perforated plate (shower head or disk) on the underside of the group, forcing the water through the ground coffee held in the filter and filter holder.

The filter and filter holder can be designed to produce a single or a double serving of espresso. If double, the filter is sufficiently large to contain twice the amount of ground coffee as a single, and the filter holder has two little outlets rather than one.

The drip tray (5) catches coffee overflow, and the steam valve or knob (6) controls the flow of steam through the steam wand, pipe, or nozzle (7), which the barista thrusts into the frothing or milk pitcher (8) to froth and heat milk for cappuccino, caffè latte, and other drinks that combine espresso coffee with hot, frothed milk. The hot water tap (9) dispenses hot water for tea and similar hot drinks, and the cup warmer (10) stores and gently preheats cups and glasses.

The illustrated machine has a very simple control panel (11). A switch above each group turns the brewing water on and off. With such machines the timing of the brewing operation is up to the barista. In machines with more complex controls the barista touches a button to select the length of the shot or serving of espresso (from a single short serving to two long servings). A computer chip does the rest. Controls for fully automatic machines may be even more elaborate, with more options, and may include readouts that provide the barista with information concerning brewing pressure, brewing temperature, and the like. For illustrated descriptions of more complex machines, see

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