Espresso

• 1. Introduction

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  Espresso is a drink measured in tiny amounts. A typical serving is 25-30 ml, and a machine finishes the job in roughly 25-30 seconds. In that short window, hot water is forced at high pressure through finely ground coffee. What lands in the cup is dark and intense, with a pale layer of foam on top called crema. It also forms the starting point for cappuccino, caffè latte and americano.

  Behind that small cup sit several puzzles. The word itself carries more than one meaning, and some English speakers insist on adding an extra letter to it. The first machines made coffee that tasted burnt, so someone had to work out how to raise the pressure without ruining the flavor. Then there is the foam, which no other brewing method produces. And there is a stubborn belief that real espresso demands dark-roast beans.

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• 2. Expressly For You

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  The word espresso has been translated in English dictionaries as 'pressed-out', but that is only one of its senses. A quoted explanation in the source points to three. One is squeezing flavor from coffee under pressure. Another is speed, as with an express train. The third is something made expressly for a person. The first Bezzera and Pavoni machines in 1906 poured one cup at a time, which fits that last meaning neatly.

  In the 1940s, Gaggia pioneered the modern method of brewing with hot water under pressure. His machines carried a different label. Old Gaggia models advertised the drink as crema caffè, literally 'cream coffee', because of the foam on top.

  English speakers in America and England have sometimes said and written 'expresso' since at least the 1940s. Dictionary.com attributes this to the fact that words starting with ex- are more common in English and easier to say. Several sources also guess that the word 'express' nudged the spelling along. Outside the English-speaking world, expresso is common in France, Portugal and Spain. The spelling espresso gained ground in the 1970s. By 1996, the third edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage described the alternative as 'entirely driven out'. The Oxford Dictionary online, as of 2016, called it 'common'.

  Italian has its own logic. It swaps s for most x letters in words of Latin origin, and x is not part of the standard Italian alphabet. The term comes from esprimere, the Italian verb meaning to express, which descends from the Latin exprimere. Italians often call the drink simply caffè, since espresso is the ordinary coffee to order. According to Slate magazine, most commentators reject expresso, and Garner's Modern American Usage sides with Italy. Some opponents treat it as a faux pas. The Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster list it as a variant spelling. The story of the machine behind the name begins in Turin in the 1880s.

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• 3. Steam And Burnt Coffee

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  In 1884, an inventor from Turin named Angelo Moriondo patented a coffee machine that used steam to push water through the grounds. It controlled steam and water separately. According to Bersten, Moriondo was 'certainly one of the earliest discoverers of the expresso machine, if not the earliest'. His machine had a limit, though. It brewed in bulk rather than in single servings.

  The push for such machines came from a wider setting. Coffee reached Italy in the 16th century, and the first recorded coffee houses opened about a hundred years later. By the middle of the 19th century, Italians drank it everywhere, brewed as drip coffee at home and as infused coffee in cafés. After the 1890s, an economic depression ended and demand grew. Manufacturers across Europe wanted to shorten the wait for café customers and to brew big batches that could be portioned later.

  A machine for single portions arrived in 1901, when Luigi Bezzera of Milan filed a patent. His design had a boiler that made steam, and the steam drove water to one of several heads. The water cooled on the way to a temperature judged better for brewing. A portafilter packed with compressed coffee attached to each head, giving the customer a portion made expressly for them.

  In 1903, another Milanese man, Desiderio Pavoni, bought Bezzera's patents. He added a mechanism to release pressure and began selling machines in 1905. Historians generally hold these to be the first commercial espresso machines. They could turn out as many as 1,000 coffees an hour. The steam and high heat, however, left the drinks black, bitter and burnt in taste. The pressure was only about 1.5 bar, far too low by modern standards, and there was no crema. Each shot also took almost a minute, around twice as long as a shot today.

  Bezzera and Pavoni sold their respective machines at the World Fair Expo in Milan in 1906.

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• 4. A Habit Takes Hold

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  For about a decade after the Milan fair, the market for espresso stayed confined to Milan. Two things helped it spread. American-style bars let customers drink coffee standing up rather than sitting down. Then World War I gave young Italian men coffee as part of their rations, and many carried the daily habit home.

  During the first thirty years, few establishments could afford the costly machines. Pavoni, Victoria Arduino of Turin and San Marco of Udine built most of them. The small Italian market could not support them alone, so they relied on exports across Europe to stay profitable.

  In the 1920s, Pier Teresio Arduino of Victoria Arduino marketed machines with Art Deco styling. Design had moved from austere to opulent, and the machines became popular symbols of domestic modernity in Italy. They also shrank, and their energy source changed from gas to electricity. Coffee drinking peaked in 1929. In the 1930s, drinking espresso outside the home overtook the older habit of making plain coffee in the kitchen.

  Then consumption fell. Fascists banned luxury items, and the Great Depression cut spending. The low point came in 1941, when Italy lost its African territories and every coffee import stopped. Still, inventors had never stopped chasing a bigger problem: how to raise the pressure without scorching the coffee.

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• 5. Chasing Pressure

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  Arduino tried air pumps and screw pistons to reach higher pressure, and neither worked. In 1935 in Trieste, Francesco Illy registered a patent for the Illetta, which used compressed air instead of steam. Three years later in Milan, Achille Gaggia registered a patent with the same aim. His version employed a hand-pulled, rotating piston.

  Gaggia refined the piston in 1947. His new machines had much smaller boilers, which made steam to push water into a receptacle of standardized size, so each coffee came out at a standard size too. A lever-operated piston with gears and a spring then pressurized the water to 12 atmospheres. The water shot through the coffee puck and formed crema from essential oils and colloids. Gaggia began selling the machines the following year, 1948. His advertising stressed the absence of steam and the presence of crema, and he sold the drink as crema caffè. These are typically seen as the first modern espresso machines.

  Over the next decade, workshops in Milan kept inventing. The Cimbali company replaced springs with hydraulics and tried, like Gaggia, to coin a new name for the drink, cimbalino. The biggest leap came in 1961 from Ernesto Valente, who invented the Faema E61. Valente had manufactured Gaggia's 1948 machine, but they parted ways over strategy. Gaggia viewed espresso machines as a niche, expensive product for establishments that could afford them. Valente saw a broad market for cheap machines.

  The E61 mechanized the process. An on-off switch controlled an electric pump that pressurized water to 9 bar. Water came straight from the plumbing and traveled through a copper pipe inside a boiler, held at a temperature the makers considered ideal. The machine was cheap, with a 'pop' design, and it arrived as much of Italy gained electricity for the first time. Baristas no longer had to pause while the boiler recovered between shots. The horizontal boiler also let them talk with customers at eye level.

  Italians carried espresso culture into their East African colonies, Italian Somalia and Italian Eritrea.

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• 6. Anatomy Of A Shot

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  Warm honey is the source's own comparison for the thickness of espresso. It is generally denser than coffee made any other way, thanks to its high load of suspended and dissolved solids and the crema on top. Pressurized brewing also leaves the flavors and chemicals very concentrated.

  A cup of espresso has three phases. One is an emulsion of oil droplets, another is suspended solids, and the third is a layer of gas bubbles or foam. In the mouth, the dispersed droplets feel creamy and give the drink its body. They also hold on to some aromatic compounds that escape into the air with other brewing methods.

  Crema, the dense foam at the top, belongs to espresso alone. The oils in the ground coffee become emulsified into a colloid, which does not happen in other brewing methods. Very high pressure lets the water dissolve more carbon dioxide, a gas that forms inside the beans during roasting.

  Caffeine turns out to be a matter of arithmetic. Espresso has more caffeine per unit of volume than most coffee drinks. But a typical serving holds about 65 milligrams, while a 240 ml cup of drip coffee holds about 95 mg. The small cup wins on concentration and loses on total.

  In a 100 ml reference amount, the nutrition tables list significant levels of magnesium, B vitamins, niacin and riboflavin. They give around 212 mg of caffeine per 100 grams of brewed liquid.

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• 7. Pulling A Shot

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  The phrase 'pulling' an espresso dates from lever machines, where a barista pulled down a handle attached to a spring-loaded piston. That piston forced hot water through the coffee at high pressure. Today an electric pump supplies the pressure far more often than a lever.

  No universal standard defines the extraction. Several institutions have published definitions that restrict the amount and type of coffee, the water temperature and pressure, and the rate of extraction. The Italian Espresso National Institute sets out the figures for a 'certified Italian espresso'. It specifies 7 grams of ground coffee, give or take half a gram. Water leaves the unit at 88 degrees Celsius, plus or minus 2, and sits at 67 degrees, plus or minus 3, in the cup. Entry pressure is 9 bar, plus or minus 1. Percolation lasts 25 seconds, plus or minus 5. The finished cup must have a viscosity above 1.5 mPa s at 45 degrees, more than 2 mg/ml of total fat, and less than 100 mg of caffeine. Its volume, crema included, is 25 ml, plus or minus 2.5.

  The grind size, water temperature, pressure and the barista's skill with the tamper all shape the result. Tamping means packing and leveling the grounds, and it helps water pass through them evenly.

  As for the dark-roast belief, the source calls it a myth. Any bean or roast level can make authentic espresso. In southern Italy, a darker roast is generally preferred. Farther north, the preference moves toward slightly lighter roasts, and outside Italy a wide range is popular.

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• 8. Sizes And Drinks

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  A single espresso uses roughly 7 grams of coffee, a double about 14, and a triple about 21. Each size has a matching filter basket. The Italian word doppio is often used for a double, while solo and triplo are rarer. The single is the traditional size because it was the most a lever machine could easily pull. Single baskets are sharply tapered, so they match the depth, and the resistance to water pressure, of the double baskets. Most double baskets taper gently in the 'Faema model', while the La Marzocco has straight sides. Triple baskets are normally straight-sided.

  A portafilter often has two closely spaced spouts and a double-size basket. They can fill two cups or a single one. True solo espresso are rare, and a single in a café is usually half of a doppio. In America, larger milk-based drinks with three or four espressi are called 'triple' or 'quad'.

  Length is a separate variable, with three standard terms. Ristretto means reduced, normale means standard, and lungo means long. Typically a ristretto has half the volume of a normale, and a lungo has double to triple. For 14 grams of dry coffee, a normale uses about 60 ml of water, and a double ristretto uses about 30 ml. These forms are not the same shot stopped at different moments, since that would under- or over-extract it. Instead the grind changes, finer for ristretto and coarser for lungo. The caffè crema is longer still, from 120 to 240 ml, brewed with a coarser grind. Too much water brings out unpleasant flavors.

  Milk and water open up a range of drinks. A macchiato, meaning 'spot' or 'stain', classically adds a spoonful of milk foam to the espresso. A modern version fills the cup to the edge with microfoam. An americano tops espresso with hot water at a ratio of 1:5, and a long black pours the espresso into the water instead. A cappuccino pairs espresso with plenty of milk and foam, and latte art is used. A caffè latte pours at least 210 grams of lightly whipped milk at 58-70 degrees Celsius into the espresso. For a latte macchiato, milk and foam go in a tall glass first and rest for at least half a minute. The espresso follows, creating three colored layers.

  Other variants range from espresso con panna, with cream, to the Viennese coffee, a double espresso with whipped cream. There is also caffè corretto, 'corrected coffee', with brandy, grappa or sambuca, and the espresso martini with coffee liqueur and vodka. In the freddo espresso, the coffee is mixed with sugar and ice. The list even includes espresso and tonic.

  Espresso also plays a central role in coffee shop culture and in the third-wave coffee movement, which prizes artisanal production and high-quality beans. The machines have moved into kitchens too. The first one built for home use was the Gaggia Gilda, soon followed by the Faema Faemina, the FE-AR La Peppina and the VAM Caravel.

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