As beans age they express gases. The gas __________________________________
Buy LaVazza beans from Amazon and they could have been roasted months ago. They will note their flimsy bag is vacuum sealed but even a pressure canister will let in air after a week. A local roaster will put the roasted date in plain sight, and they can tell you based on experience when to grind and use the beans. Yet the aging that has to take place before freshly roasted beans will be just right continues to happen, so you will likely be adjusting your grinder as they change.
A new study says science can help. It won't turn your espresso into art any more than a science of dancing can turn you into Lady Gaga, but it can get you out of any get-together with your dignity intact.
In 1884, Angelo Moriondo of Turin patented the first espresso machine and like pistols and cars from that period, the science hasn't changed all that much. A whiskey entrepreneur and engineer improved the patent with a portafilter and a pressure release valve. The pressure used to be applied manually but motorized pumps became common in the 1960s.
Yet at its heart it's still the same as 1920; hot water is forced through a puck of finely ground coffee and a filter.
Folk wisdom says you need an ounce of finely ground espresso beans to get a decent pull but if you believed in folk wisdom without hard evidence you wouldn't be here.
www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/mathematicians-say-theyve-figured-out-how-to-brew-a-better-espresso-shot?utm_source=science20.com
An espresso machine relies on a pressure pump to force water that’s near boiling through a "puck" of ground coffee and a filter, producing a thick and concentrated coffee known as espresso.
Most coffee shops use extra-fine grind settings and a large amount of coffee — around 20 grams — to brew a single shot of espresso. It’s thought that using a fine grind exposes more of the coffee’s surface area to water, which should increase extraction yield, a measure of the amount of coffee that actually dissolves and ends up in the final beverage. While this industry practice sounds good in theory, the researchers found that it leaves a lot of room for variation that can affect taste.
According to study author Christopher Hendon, a computational chemist at the University of Oregon (and who has sidelined as a competitive barista), most coffee shops aim for an extraction yield that's between 17 to 23 percent. Lower extraction yields taste sour, while higher yields are too bitter.
In this study, the team developed a mathematical model and brewed thousands of espresso shots to pinpoint the variables required to achieve coffee with consistent extraction yields. They discovered that when beans are ground too fine, it can gum up the espresso machine and impact the taste of the final product.
“Clogging is happening when you over-grind. So, you can imagine if you’ve got a very finely ground coffee, when you turn the [pressure] pump on, all of the very fine bits are swept along with the water, and they all kind of clog up,” said study author Jamie Foster, a mathematician at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. “This is what leads to that inefficient extraction that we’re referring to. And that clogging process is very random and hard to predict.”
In other words, using a coarser grind and reducing the amount of coffee per shot leaves some extra room in the coffee bed, leading to a fuller, more even brewing process.
And don't worry about your caffeine boost. A slightly coarser grind and around 15 or 16 grams per shot is just as potent as the standard fine-grained 20-gram espresso shot, Hendon said. These changes can also result in very fast shots of less than 15 seconds, which is less than the standard 20 to 30 seconds it takes to brew a serving of espresso.
The Other Extreme
But, a word of caution: Coffee that’s too coarse can be just as problematic as coffee that’s too fine. The grind size adjustments recommended in this study are so slight they would be undetectable to the naked eye.
“It would be an unpleasant experience trying to brew espresso using a French press grind setting, (it would) explode out of the group head in a matter of seconds” explained the paper’s lead author Michael Cameron in an email. “Instead, we’re saying you’d need to grind slightly coarser than you typically would for espresso.”
Cameron, a barista and special projects manager at ST. ALi cafe in Australia, expla
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