Your kitchen is not a cafe
Why making coffee for yourself changes the rules.
In Australia, espresso is king. Thanks in no small part to post-war European immigration, and particularly the influence of Italian coffee culture, we fell in love with espresso and never really looked back. Today it is so completely the default way of making coffee that everything else is described in relation to it. In Australia, espresso is coffee. Filter, batch brew, plunger, AeroPress and all the rest are the alternative methods.
Our cafés reflect this almost exclusively. Walk into practically any coffee shop in the country and you already understand the game. There will be an espresso machine on the bench, grinders beside it and a familiar set of drinks on the board. You probably know what you are ordering before you reach the counter.
There are good reasons for this. Espresso is fast and reliable. In under 30 seconds, a good machine and a capable barista can produce a small, deeply flavoured concentrate which can then be expanded into a neat pattern of drinks. Add textured milk in slightly different quantities and you have a flat white, latte, piccolo or cappuccino. Add hot water and you have a long black. Leave it alone and you have an espresso. Add less hot water and perhaps we can all enjoy another argument about what technically makes something a short or long macchiato.
That shared understanding is part of what makes the system work. It suits the customer who wants to place an order without first sitting through a presentation. It suits the coffee shop trying to make 300 patterned drinks before lunch, and it suits the roaster filling the grinders of cafés across the city. Speed, accuracy, efficiency, repeatability and consistency are the foundations of a good coffee business, and Australian cafés have become very good at delivering them.
Our coffee culture is internationally renowned, particularly in Melbourne and its surrounds, and deservedly so. However, there is one fairly important difference between the café making your morning coffee and the espresso machine sitting in your kitchen.
You are not running a café.
Things are different at home
I know many of you have an espresso machine sitting on the kitchen bench. The home coffee boom since COVID has been hard to miss. Breville, Sunbeam and De’Longhi machines have made their way into an enormous number of Australian kitchens, alongside increasingly capable grinders and plenty of more specialised machines. Some of those machines are very good. Some cost more than the first car I owned.
Despite having all this equipment at our disposal, we often judge what comes out of it against the wrong standard. We try to reproduce the coffee we buy from a café, copying its recipes, methods and definitions of a correctly made drink.
Why?
A café might make hundreds of drinks in a day. You are making one, two or perhaps three coffees in a session. You have no customers waiting, nobody watching the clock and nobody rating your work online because their flat white took seven minutes to arrive. The café’s job is to serve a lot of people well. Your job is to make yourself happy right now, and I think that changes nearly everything.
At home, time is on your side. You can spend an extra minute doing something that would be ridiculous in a commercial setting. You can alter one small part of your process and see what happens. You can make a mistake, drink it anyway and try something different tomorrow.
You can even afford a little experimental waste. That sounds bad at first, but scale matters. Losing two grams of coffee while trying something new at home is an experiment. Multiply those two grams across hundreds of drinks every day and it becomes a serious economic problem for a business already operating on thin margins.
A café has to ask whether something can be done efficiently, repeatedly and by several people in the middle of a busy service. You only have to ask whether it makes your coffee taste better. Those are not the same question.
Let’s begin with the crema
Here is one small experiment I would like you to try. It requires no new equipment. You do not need to buy a precision basket, install an app or watch a 40-minute video made by someone who has formed a surprisingly emotional relationship with water chemistry. You only need your espresso machine, some coffee and a teaspoon.
Brew an espresso as well as you know how. Take your time. Get the dose, grind and extraction where you want them. Use your beautiful machine and make what you consider to be a proper shot, then stop for a moment and look at it.
Espresso is not a uniform soup. There is the dark, concentrated coffee underneath and the whipped layer of crema resting on top. We love the crema, don’t we? It looks rich, it photographs beautifully and it is visible evidence that our expensive machine has achieved something a plunger, and all those other poor brewing choices, cannot.
Crema makes espresso look like espresso.
Now take your teaspoon and carefully scoop a little from the top. Try to collect mostly crema without digging too deeply into the liquid underneath, then taste it. Do not look for the correct answer or worry about what you are supposed to find. Pay attention to what is actually happening in your mouth. Is it sweet? Is it smooth? Is it sharp, bitter or drying? Most importantly, do you enjoy it?
Now, if you can bear to interfere further with your beautiful espresso, remove the rest of the crema. Scoop it from the surface and put it aside until you are left with the dark liquid underneath. Take another spoon and taste that.
It is not the same, is it? Which one seemed sharper and more bitter? Which one felt smoother? Which one would you prefer to drink?
You are allowed to change the coffee
Crema is not inherently bad, and removing it is not a new rule I am trying to introduce. Its flavour and texture will vary with the coffee, its age, the roast and the way the shot was extracted. Stirred through the espresso, you may find that everything comes together nicely. In a milk drink, the sharper qualities of the crema may simply disappear into the larger combination of coffee, milk, sweetness and texture.
You might taste both parts and decide you prefer the espresso exactly as it was. Excellent, that is useful information. You might instead find that the crema contributes a bitter, crisp or drying note that you do not particularly enjoy. Perhaps removing some or all of it makes the drink better for you. That is useful information too.
A café is unlikely to stand there painstakingly spooning the crema from every espresso before building a drink. Frankly, it should not. Imagine doing this in the middle of the morning rush while another 15 orders curl their way out of the printer. It would be slow, difficult to repeat consistently and largely unnoticed by most customers.
The café has a job to do. You have one coffee sitting in front of you, and you are free to do whatever you like with it.
The café is not the unquestioned ideal
None of this is an argument against cafés, espresso or the craft of a good barista. Café coffee is built around a remarkably effective system. It gives us a shared language, a recognisable menu and drinks that can be made quickly and consistently. When it is done well, it is very good indeed.
Commercial excellence and personal enjoyment, however, are not always the same thing. At home, you do not need to copy every choice a café makes because many of those choices exist in response to circumstances you do not share. A café needs a recipe that works across an entire day, while you can change yours halfway through the cup. A café needs to control waste, while you can sacrifice a few grams to curiosity. A café needs several baristas to produce similar results, while you only need to understand what you did.
Most importantly, a café usually needs to make the drink its customer expects. You are allowed to discover that you like something unexpected.
This is where making coffee at home becomes interesting. The espresso machine on your bench does not have to be a miniature café installation. It can be a tool for paying attention. You can stir the espresso or leave it layered. You can remove the crema, change the ratio or let the shot run a little longer because you enjoy what happens next, even if someone on the internet insists the extraction should have stopped six seconds ago.
You can texture your milk differently, use less of it or leave it out altogether. You can warm the cup, cool the cup or pour the whole thing over ice. You can take apart the assumptions hidden inside a familiar drink and decide which ones are useful to you.
Some experiments will make the coffee worse. That is fine. Drink it, tip it out or rescue it with milk. Tomorrow morning you get another go. The point is not to become deliberately unconventional, and there is no prize for producing the strangest coffee in the street. The point is simply to notice that you have a choice.
where does this all lead?
Coffees that want a little more attention
Our recent recipes for the Hello Coffee Spirit Infusion range are a good case in point. These barrel-aged coffees rarely make their way into cafés because they are both expensive and rather niche. They do not naturally fit the fast pace of a room where customers enter already knowing what they want. There is also the small issue that grinding them can make the café smell like a distillery.
At home, though, they shine. These are coffees that reward a more considered approach to brewing because their best qualities are often the softer, sweeter notes carried by the cask. Oak, vanilla, dried fruit, caramel and warm spice can all become more apparent when the coffee is treated gently, rather than pushed through a recipe designed principally for speed and strength.
The recipes we recently published take that idea further. The whisky-aged coffee becomes a Midnight Cask Cream Float with orange, brown sugar, winter spice and cold cream. Wild Bourbon becomes a Sticky Date Butter Coffee with steamed milk, cinnamon, nutmeg and just enough salt to keep the sweetness in line. The Last Embers, our rum-infused coffee, is poured over coconut cream and vanilla ice cream to make a Coconut Snowcap, finished with cinnamon and toasted coconut.
None of these drinks is especially well suited to being made 300 times before lunch. That is precisely the point. They ask you to slow down, warm something in a saucepan, grate a little nutmeg or float cream over the back of a spoon. They give you a reason to gather a few people around the kitchen bench and make coffee part of the occasion, rather than something produced quickly before everyone heads in a different direction.
The Spirit Infusion coffees are unusual, but the principle applies to every coffee you make at home. Your kitchen gives you room to be curious. You can follow our recipes exactly, change them to suit what is in the cupboard or ignore them entirely and discover your own way to bring the coffee forward.
A café has customers, a queue, a workflow and a business to run. At home, none of those rules need to follow you into the kitchen. Make the espresso, scoop off the crema and taste both parts. Brew the barrel-aged coffee gently, add cinnamon, nutmeg or coconut, and serve it to someone who might enjoy the experiment with you.
Perhaps you will put everything back together and carry on as before. Perhaps you will not. Either way, you are no longer merely trying to reproduce someone else’s coffee.
You are learning how to make your own.