Espresso: What you need and need to know. Part One:Coffee

     So, I decided to break up this article into multiple parts, one through six. A new part will be posted each week, after all parts have been posted I will post all of them in one long post. A long time coming, well, here we go.

    The coffee. First off, you need fresh coffee and when I say fresh I mean no more than 14 days off roast. I prefer coffee that is between one day old and no more than seven days off the roast. Now I know that some say coffee for espresso needs to be at least fourteen days off roast, but I think that is a pile of  ……. (control yourself, noah) ok here is what you need to do, get some coffee and hold on to it until it is over 14 days stale, then go and get some fresh coffee that is as close to the roast as possible and make some espresso with each, and decide for yourself. Wow, you’re right the fresh coffee is better than the stale coffee. Yah I know! So how can I get coffee that is only one day off roast?  Well, I would look for some local roasters in your area. No luck? Well, you could try some online roasters. Ok, so online roasters are not exclusive to the internet, they are local to somewhere but they offer their coffee for order. Now the trick is to find one that is close enough to ship ground and get it in no more than 3 days. I am lucky, I live close enough to Intelligentsia Coffee Chicago to get it in one day, using UPS Ground. Now you could use 2 day or overnight but that can be expensive, if you have the money to spare go for it. I will include a list of good roasters, hopefully one is close enough to you for a 3day max of shipping. If not do some looking. I am sure you’ll find one.
    What about the roast itself, I have to buy a “French” or “Italian” roast right? No, not really. The roast does not have to be a “dark” roast or any special roast of any kind, a light roast can be used for espresso. Personally I like a lighter roast for my espresso. Well what about the coffee? I have to buy a special coffee for Espresso right? No and yes, there are single origin coffees that work well for espresso and there are many great “blends” for espresso. Ok, so here’s the thing, making espresso is a very violent thing for coffee, and it will bring out some of the bad traits in the coffee. So finding a Single Origin that can hold up to the task is hard but not impossible. So, what many roasters will do is, “blending“. The roaster blends the coffees by combining different coffees, they may use as many as six different coffees or as few as two in their blend. This is to make up for the individual coffees weaknesses, sometimes the individual coffees are roasted to different levels. Lets say that one coffee by itself is to sour, so they may add a coffee that is more sweet, to help compensate to create a balanced espresso blend. Now that is a simplified version, real blending is much more complex and there are many more variables involved, but that’s the jist of it. Is a blend a bad thing? No, not at all, just remember that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, the same is true for blends. So use a reputable roaster that discloses what coffees are in their blends and don’t be afraid to sample many different blends and single origin coffees to find one you like.
    One last thing on freshness, ….that is, the freshness of the ground coffee, there is no point to having fresh coffee if you grind your coffee and let it sit around to get stale. Coffee will go stale very fast after grinding. The compounds in coffee that are responsible for most of the flavor are exceptionally volatile and they will decay when exposed to the air after grinding. In the same way that un-ground coffee will go stale, just not at such an accelerated rate. Coffee goes stale because of the evaporation of certain compounds in the coffee, mainly the oils which are relatively safe in the coffee “bean” but once you grind, you crush the coffee exposing much more surface area speeding up the evaporation. Here’s how to combat the stale-ing, always grind your coffee at the last possible moment before you use it and store your un-ground coffee in an airtight container, this will not stop the inevitable stale-ing but it will slow it.

Places to get great coffee:
Zoka Coffee
Ecco Caffe
Intelligentsia Coffee
Counterculture Coffee
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Espresso: What you need and need to know. Part One:Coffee by Noah Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.