This year, we all collectively became baristas. Whether you embraced Zoom meetings on your living room couch with a Chemex nearby, or purchased an espresso machine and learned how to dial in the perfect shot, our morning coffee ritual has never been so treasured. Upon looking at our sales this past year, we especially saw an uptick in our Coffee Shop Espresso — the same creamy espresso blend we pour at our cafe in Incline Village each day. If you've recently converted to an at-home espresso experience and need some help dialing in the beans to get your shots firing, here's a few troubleshooting tips to get that coffee shop experience at home:
- All coffee off-gases from the roaster and typically 3-4 days off roast for drip brewing and 5-7 days off roast for espresso is a good rule of thumb for when the coffee will begin tasting best—obviously there is some subjection here, but objectively if there is still carbon in the beans it’ll be in the brew. Espresso uses pressure to brew and therefore has a propensity to be more difficult to extract. So, while "fresh beans" is a good thing, you don't want too fresh.
- Sour notes can come from a few reasons: 1) under-extracted coffee i.e. there was not enough coffee in the puck or 2) there was not enough water to coffee exposure time. Check out our espresso brew guide below for more info.
- A small scale may help with shot consistency. The more variables you can fix the easier it is to troubleshoot. So if you use our brew guide below, consider trying to fix the coffee weight in, the coffee weight out and the time your espresso machine brews. This would only leave you with grind size and tamp as adjustable variables.
- Tamping—while finding consistency tamping may be challenging, you’ll want to make sure your elbow is at a 90 degree angle and you push straight down so the puck is even. Typically, we suggest about 30 pounds of pressure which would probably be a soft/medium press down on the tamper from the 90 angle.
We go through rigorous quality control in our sourcing and roasting to make sure our coffee is always more sweet, less bitter… and never sour! Feel free to hit us up at hello@drinkcoffeedostuff.com if you have more questions. And shop our delicious Coffee Shop Espresso blend here!
