May 12, 2009

Last year, pretty much on a whim, I decided that I wanted to buy an espresso machine for our house, and so I did some reading online, chose a reasonable looking machine and went to a shop to ask about it. The guy in the shop looked me up and down and then asked whether I wouldn’t rather go for a machine that would take a prepacked coffee tablet and fully automatically spit out a cup of coffee. I told him no, but he assured me that the machine I was looking at would be such a difficult beast to master that it would – to roughly paraphrase – suck the joy out of a morning. I bought it anyway. There is no romance to something you can’t easily screw up.

After buying the machine I did some research into how to use it properly. During this time my friends used the word “obsessed” a bit more than usual, but were quite happy to drink my experimental coffees. It turns out there is a lot to making a good coffee, so the guy in the shop was right on that account, but he was wrong about it not being fun to learn about. To sum it up, to make a good coffee a whole bunch of different things have to be ‘just right’: the bean quality, the coarseness of the grind, the temperature of the water, the tamping down of the coffee, the pressure of the water, the time the machine is left to push water through the coffee, the temperature of the cups. This is to make a simple shot of espresso which doesn’t involve any frothed milk.

After getting the machine and using it for a bit with preground coffee I decided enough was enough and bought a good grinder, which is actually more important than the machine in terms of how the coffee will turn out. I think the next step could be to roast my own coffee beans, but perhaps that’s taking it a bit far. You never know – I thought owning a grinder was taking it too far before I had one, and I haven’t looked back.

The whole ongoing experience means that I now can’t help but rate all coffees I try at cafes – in Canberra, the Group Seven coffee shops are about the best I think I’ve come across. I’ve become a coffee snob, as evidenced by the fact that I use the word “crema” more than I used to, which is to say – at all.