How to Make an Espresso

This is not going to take long. Short and sweet, just like real espresso.

Eventually, CoffeeGeek will publish the definitive guide and masterclass to making espresso, but this How To is not it. This How To is designed to give you some basic fundamentals needed to make a great shot of espresso. We’ll walk you through the steps on a very popular consumer espresso machine, explaining in the steps why we’re doing the things we do, and then after those steps, I’ll dive a bit deeper into a few core fundamentals about making great espresso.

Espresso’s a hotly debated topic in the specialty coffee realm. Some worship it, others disdain it. Some feel there’s too much emphasis put on minutia, others feel there’s not nearly enough. A long time ago George Howell, the founder of the Cup of Excellence global coffee selection event, and the person considered the father of specialty coffee on the US East Coast, once told me “When it comes to coffee, our knowledge of it is barely out of childhood. When it comes to espresso, we’re barely out of the cradle”. And that’s how I feel about espresso: we still know next to nothing about the perfect espresso shot, and the goal posts are always moving. With this how to, we’ll try to show you methods to at least hit it in the ballpark.

For this How To, we’re using the Breville Barista Express (available from idrinkcoffee in Canada for $599, and from Amazon in the US for $499). We’re using this machine because it’s currently the most popular espresso machine in Canada and the US, and very suited for making great espresso. For the coffee, we’ve settled in on one of our favourite blends: Social Coffee’s People’s Liberation Blend, which not only makes a fantastic, chocolatey rich espresso, but is also very forgiving on brewing techniques.

Our step by step for making a traditional double shot of espresso follows; in it, we’ll detail important things to do that can improve your beverage. Later on in the article, we’ll expand on the reasons why. This how to assumes that a) you have quality, fresh coffee (read more about how to make this happen); b) you have good, fresh, filtered water, and c) you’ve properly dialed in your grinder for pulling a good shot. Dialing in a grinder is such a heavy thing, we may eventually write a How To on just that subject.

Here’s the steps to a great espresso shot.
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Everything fresh and clean Great espresso happens when everything you use is fresh and of good quality. Coffee roasted within the last two weeks. Fresh, clean and filtered water.  Clean grouphead and dispersion screen (that screen up where your portafilter locks into). Clean portafilter.

Preheat everything Make sure everything you’re using to make your espresso is hot: the machine (run some blank shots through it to heat up the grouphead and portafilter), and your cup. It’s only going to hold about 50-60ml of liquid and crema (about 40-45g of weight), so it needs help to prevent the espresso from cooling down too quick.

Grind just before brewing One of the keys to great espresso is grinding your coffee literally seconds before you have it in the espresso machine, ready to brew a shot. One of the key elements of great espresso is the role of carbon dioxide (CO2) gas; it helps transport non water soluble taste and aroma elements into the cup and helps develop crema. Those fresh coffee beans store a lot of it, but roughly 80% of the stored CO2 evacuates from the coffee within 2 minutes after it is ground. You don’t want that CO2 in the air; you want it an active part of your beverage. Keep the time between grinder and shot pull short.

Dose 16-19g of coffee Depending on your machine, dose out your normal double shot volume of coffee. Once we dialed in this Barista Express, we found 18 grams was a good dose at about a 4 setting on the grinder dial.

Level your coffee Some grinders back load or front load the ground coffee into the filter basket. Some put out excessive clumps. Get to know your grinder, and deal with this potential pitfall to great espresso: coffee must be distributed in the filter basket evenly, before you tamp. If your grinder “backloads” the ground coffee, like this Barista Express does, use the side of your finger to move the coffee forward and pack it down a bit into the basket.

Tamp your coffee Once you’re satisfied with your quick levelling of the bed of coffee, tamp it down with your preferred espresso tamper. We’re using the Express’ included magnetic tamper to do this. How much pressure you press down with is not nearly as important as making sure your compacted bed of coffee is perfectly level, 360 degrees around the basket. Use your thumb and forefinger, like in this photo, to rotate the tamper to ensure it is level.

Lock into machine Very carefully, without knocking or jarring the portafilter, lock it into place in your espresso machine. If you happen to ding or knock it against the grouphead, you have probably unsettled your hard work in levelling and tamping down the coffee. Treat it with kid gloves when inserting into the machine and locking it into position.

Pull the shot Once the portafilter is in place, immediately start pulling the shot. On a lever machine, that means pulling the lever down to cock the spring (or up to open the brew chamber, if using a La Pavoni). On a manual, semi auto or automatic machine (like this Barista Express) that means pushing the brew button of flicking the lever switch. If your machine has any kind of preinfusion mode, make use of it – it improves espresso.

Watch the shot develop As the shot pulls, watch it carefully; watch for a syrupy like consistency to the streams of espresso brewing out. Watch for colours. Watch for things like the streams twirling and dancing about (if that happens, something’s wrong with how you packed the coffee). Observe, and detect any defects with how the shot is pulling.

End the double shot We’re using a scale here for demonstration purposes, but I’m actually not a fan of “exactness” and stopping shots at exactly a predetermined volume (or weight). I like watching the shot progress, and I sometimes end a shot once I see evidence of blonding or thinning out of the espresso streams from the spouts. If you hit 40-45g of espresso brewed on your doubles and the shot still looks like this at the end, then you know things were working well. If you see it blonding and thinning earlier, no crime in stopping the shot before your target volume is hit. After all, taste is what’s important here.

Serve with demitasse spoon and enjoy Some people like to stir the crema into their espresso. Some like to drink it as it came out of the machine. Still others like to scoop off the crema. That’s up to them. By providing a spoon, you give your guests options. Me? Always straight, always unstirred, and it takes only 3 or 4 sips to enjoy and finish the drink.

Background and Theory of Good Espresso

Espresso is, in my opinion, the ultimate expression of what roasted coffee has to offer. It is the most concentrated format of coffee that you can currently brew. It is extremely demanding as a brewing method. The brew method is riddled with extremes and potential chaos. Think about this: you’re throwing 95C water at ultra fine granules of coffee packed into a compact, tight space, with 150 psi of pressure, nearly instantly. Think about this too: your home plumbing faucets deliver water out of the spout at about 60psi. Your espresso machine can deliver it at almost 3 times that pressure. Thank goodness it’s all contained in that tight space known as a filter basket, dispersion screen, grouphead, and portafilter.

We are a firm believer of the Italian mantra of the “four ‘Ms'” when it comes to espresso: all four of these elements are equally important: mana, or yourself and your good “hand”; macchina, or the espresso machine, well tuned and clean; macinadosatore, or the grinder, which must be up to the task of grinding for espresso; and the miscela (blend), which stresses having great, fresh coffee. I’d add a fifth: good water. Good filtered water is absolutely crucial to great espresso.

Here’s some additional tips and discussion.

Temperature and Vessels

Espresso from a Lever Machine This shot pull is from an Elektra Micro Casa a Leva; very old school technology, no gee-whiz temperature controls or any advanced, 21rst century features; but if you get to know your equipment, you can learn its limitations and advantages, and make the most out of all of them.

We’ve come a long, long way since two decades ago, when we had to settle for espresso machines that had as much as 10F (about 5-7C) variance on brewing temperatures, shot to shot. Today, you can easily find PIDs (Proportional, Integral, Derivative control – a sciencey, lab-by electronic tool for precisely controlling temperatures) inside $400 espresso machines delivering brewing temperatures to within 1F. But you can still make due with a machine that doesn’t have PID controls or other precise temperature controls. Look at the shot in the photo to the right. That’s a shot pull on a 1995 Micro Casa a Leva piston lever espresso machine from Elektra. That shot was pulled 3 months ago. Those results are achieved because of one thing: experience with the machine. Experience (and testing) to know where the machine’s sweet spot on temperatures is. It literally took maybe 500 shot pulls on that machine to get to a comfort zone where I knew how it operated enough to know how and when to pull the shot.

Temperature is also important in another area: your cups and portafilter. Espresso is a tiny drink: 30ml per single (max), or 50-60ml (about 45g in weight) per double. Liquid at 95C will cool down very fast at those volumes when surrounded by things like a barely warm portafilter, ambient air, and a cool porcelain cup. I can’t stress enough how important it is to pre-heat your espresso cup, and make sure your portafilter (and grouphead) are up to operating temperatures.

Speaking of the cup. Please, please stick to porcelain. It is the best “common” material ever designed for holding espresso or coffee for that matter. Yes, I know we used a clear cup in our how to photos, but that cup is the illy crystal nude espresso cup, and singular in both it’s ability to retain heat and present the perfect shape to receive the espresso; the cups are rare and used in this How To to demonstrate the crema. If they were readily available, I’d recommend that illy nude cup because, in my opinion, it’s the best espresso cup ever made. But a close second is the standard illy shape porcelain cups, which are much more readily available, and can be found for around $5 per cup or less on eBay.

Illy Porcelain I firmly believe the best espresso cup ever designed is the iconic illy shape. The art collection cups like these can be $$$, but you can get the simple illy branded cups for around $5 or less if you hunt around the internet. Excellent investment.

On Grinding Fresh

Always grind fresh coffee just before the shot pull

One of the key elements to great espreso is using freshly roasted coffee (absolute optimum for espresso is 4-6 days after roast, but anything less than 2 weeks old is good), and grinding literally seconds before you pull your shot. If you can be finished grinding, and have the portafilter locked and loaded in your espresso machine within 60 seconds of each other, you’re doing good.

One of the main reasons why this is important is carbon dioxide (CO2). Freshly roasted coffee has a lot of it. When you smell the aroma of great coffee when grinding, you can thank CO2 for that: it’s being released from the coffee through the grinding action, and carrying with it aromas and fragrances. Problem is, if you’re smelling it, it’s no longer in the actual ground coffee; it’s in the air, floating around. You don’t want that. You want it in your espresso!

When you grind fresh coffee, roughly 80% of it’s stored CO2 is released within 120 seconds. CO2 that would otherwise be transporting non-soluble elements from the ground coffee into your cup. CO2 that would be helping to form crema and create the emulsions formed during the espresso brewing process. In short, you want that CO2 to contribute to your cup. You can make it so by being as fast as possible between grinding and locking your portafilter into the espresso machine, and pulling your shot.

Levelling the Bed of Coffee

This is a mistake I see even seasoned professional baristas make all the time: they go through tons of care dosing their coffee out, weighing everything, making sure everything is fresh, and then when they tamp down the coffee, it’s off balanced to one side… even perhaps by just a small amount (millimeters).

This off balance leads to extraction problems: there’s literally less coffee (and thus less resistance) on one side of the puck of coffee. Water under pressure will always take the path of least resistance, which leads to under and over developed espresso shot pulls – parts of the coffee will be over extracted, and other parts will be woefully under extracted.

You can completely up your home espresso game by making sure your tamp is 100% level, all around.

Scales

Scales and espresso Scales are an incredibly useful tool for developing and improving your espresso shot pulling skills. Just don’t rely blindly on them.

You’ll notice we didn’t actually talk a lot about scales in this How To. That said, scales are vitally important to espresso as a learning tool and a corrective tool. You should definitely buy one, even if it’s just a $15 .1gram scale from Amazon.

The problem I have with scales is people tend to rely on them too much, and not actually develop their “hand” for making great espresso. Your eyes and observation should eventually develop so you know when 50ml has brewed into your favourite cup. If you watch espresso develop, and notice it’s starting to blond out (the streams get lighter and faster), end the shot, even if it’s before what you scale tells you should be a “good shot”. Taste it. If it still tastes great, all is well in the world, even if you didn’t hit your 45g target weight.

Scales should be used to learn how to make better espresso. It’s a back check to just confirm what your developing home barista skills should already be telling you: your dose is in the target range; your shot pull is coming out at a nice 1.5-2g a second; you’re brewing 20g per cup overall, yada yada.

Never let a scale tell you that you brewed a bad shot. Always let your taste be that arbiter.

Stirring and Crema

Lastly, a topic that James Hoffmann helped stir up about half a decade ago: is crema bad? Should you remove it from your espresso before drinking? Should you stir it in to the drink before trying?

I’m going to leave this up to your personal preference, but as a home coffee enthusiast, you should definitely experiment. Try tasting crema on it’s own. Try scooping it out of your espresso before drinking. And try stirring it in and drinking. Find the way you like to enjoy espresso and go with it.

Well, that concludes our Espresso How To. We do plan on doing a full masterclass and tome on the art of making espresso at a later date on CoffeeGeek. This How To is designed to give you the quick and easy method for making great espresso, with a bit of discussion afterwards, but there is so much more to say, don’t you think?

Share your thoughts about espresso brewing in our forums!

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Machine and Coffees used for this How To

– Breville Barista Express (available from idrinkcoffee in Canada for $599, and from Amazon in the US for $499).
–  Social Coffee’s People’s Liberation Blend,

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