Welcome to another episode in the Beginner's Guide to Coffee, and today we're covering espresso-based drinks. Now, that doesn't mean I'm gonna give you an exact recipe for all of the 15 different drinks that we're gonna cover.
That would take a really, really, really long time. Instead, I'm gonna give you a little bit of a history, the kind of idea behind the drink, so that you know what to order, what you might expect when you do, and what you might want to make at home.
So, first on the list, let's talk about espresso. Espresso is now incredibly difficult to actually define.
It is basically a small, strong coffee brewed under pressure, typically topped with a red-brown foam called crema. That seems a little wishy-washy, but there's loads of different ways to make espresso these days.
Now, the Italian National Espresso Institute, which of course exists, and I'm very happy it does, does have a very precise definition for Italian espresso, and I'll show that to you here. When you talk about espresso, especially online, there's a bit of a confusion between what is a single and what is a double, because here we've got, say, seven grams of coffee for a single espresso, but often you'll see recipes for 14,18,16,20 grams of coffee.
That's because they're brewing inside a double basket and not a single basket, so they're basically brewing two shots of espresso, a double espresso. Now, you'll see Italian espresso talks about millilitres in the cup, that's a volume measurement, whereas modern espresso talks about grams in the cup.
And if you have grams in the cup, and how many grams of coffee that you used, you have what are called ratios, so the ratio between ground coffee and liquid coffee. A traditional espresso is in the one-to-two, to one-to-three range, right?
So that's how much liquid you typically produce in around 25 to 30 seconds, typically under, say, six to nine bars of pressure at a brew temperature between 88 and probably 96,97 degrees Celsius. I don't want to be overly prescriptive about what it is, because it can and should be lots of different things, but that ratio will give you a pretty good idea of what to expect from a traditional espresso.
And as I said, modern coffee shops typically serve you a double espresso as standard. Traditional coffee shops will typically serve you a single espresso as standard.
Another quick note, if you're in Italy, you'll probably notice that no one really orders an espresso at the bar. They say, Caffe, right?
