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April 29, 2005

How to choose a great coffee shop

Over at The Coffee Odyssey, they're swooning over Seattle's coffee culture, and expounding on ways to ensure that your taste buds will never be assaulted by burnt, bitter coffee and indifferent crema.

We should state at the outset that outside Rome, Melbourne is possibly the world's coffee capital. But if you stuck to the following routine, you'd possibly never have another latte in your life:

• The barista will pour cold milk [was that whole? 2%?] into a cold, clean, empty pitcher. After purging the sparkling clean steam wand, the barista will heat, texture and stretch the milk, creating a mass of tiny bubbles with a mirror-like sheen on the surface... judging by hand and smell [or thermometer] when the temperature is right. Steaming finished, the barista will clean, and again purge the steam wand.
• The barista will start the grinder, remove the portafilter from the espresso machine's group-head, flush the group and clean and dry the filter basket.
• The barista will dose, level and tamp the coffee into the portafilter basket, brush away any stray coffee, lock the portafilter into the group and immediately pull the shot into a clean, preheated 6- to 7-ounce cup [or shot pitcher].
• The extraction time will be 25 to 30 seconds, and should yield a 1 ounce [single] or 2 ounce [double] shot. [Single or double, the time of the extraction will be the same.] The espresso will pour like honey, and will have a dense layer of reddish-brown crema on the surface.
• The barista will pour the textured milk into the cup with the espresso... and, if you're lucky, treat you to an artfully poured rosette. Lovely!

Posted by cw at April 29, 2005 12:48 PM

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Posted by: syd at April 30, 2005 11:33 AM