One of the guys that works with me at Spot Elmwood was headed down to Philadelphia for a few days, to visit the Mutter Museum of Medical Oddities among other things. When I learned this, I immediately gave him directions to go to Ultimo coffee (it's possible I may have also instructed him to hit on Aaron Ultimo for me if possible). And, knowing that they have Counter Culture coffee, I was hoping he could pick me up a pound of that Espresso Apollo that everyone's been talking about. Kevin came through on all counts.

I got the Apollo dialed in, gave it a stir, gave it a sip. Initial reactions: phreow, sweet! Tart and juicy, ridiculously bright. The first food association I made was some kind of lemon bar or pie: definitely not sour but pointed that direction, with a kind of buttery-sugar thing underneath the fruit. I'm not so good (yet!) at pulling out individual specific flavors out of the mix, unless it's a hit-you-over-the-head kind of flavor, and this is a delightfully complex espresso. Four of us gave it a try yesterday, and after the initial “phreow!” we all stared off into space making chewing motions for a minute or two trying to figure it all out. The shots I pulled today were a little more mellow, still very sweet and juicy, but more “round” if that means anything. Unfortunately, at this point the beans are going on 10 days old, not in the best container for at least a few of those, so I may be missing some of the clarity of flavor other reviewers have been talking about.

I'm hoarding my 1lb too much to use this blend for milk drinks (plus I'm doling it out to other baristas), but I can well believe that it would vanish under the cow: everything interesting here is the front-end, acidy stuff that gets muted in a cap or a latte. This is a drinking espresso, indeed, and I've never tasted its like in Buffalo.

So! Rant on espresso: what elements might help create an environment where we could see more awesome espresso options in the café scene around here?

I'm most familiar with Spot's Espresso blend, of course, and while it makes a very decent drinking espresso, where it really shines is as the base for big milky drinks: it's got a big heavy body that can punch through 10+ oz of milk and syrup and still taste like coffee. I'll occasionally grab an espresso straight at other Buffalo cafés; most of them seem to be what I think of as very Italian-style. In many ways I think this “traditional, Italian-style espresso” (excuse the scare quotes) is rated higher the more it resembles Turkish coffee without the sludge. One of the things I hope to ask other baristas in the area is: does your espresso blend have a goal, and what is it? Do you pull normale, ristretto, or even on the long side?

I always get a little excited on the rare occasions we run low on espresso blend, because that means dialing in an SO espresso for a couple hours. I'm lucky enough to have a third grinder now at Elmwood, which acts mainly as a training tool and back-up, and allows me to pull shots of different coffees for palate training (comparing the component beans of our blend, for example, so trainees can taste what each is contributing). Sometimes our roaster will mention that one of our single-origins might be interesting as an espresso, so I'll give that a try, maybe even sell a few shots to customers—but it never takes off.

People don't buy that much espresso! At least not at my store. They buy lots of lattes, cappuccinos, brewed coffee, sweet drinks, but not straight espresso. We have a few regular spro drinkers, but it's only a handful—espresso (and macciatos) are a really small percentage of our drink sales.

A couple theories on the relative unpopularity of this most wonderful beverage: price & drip competition, atmosphere, and perception.

Price & the Comparison to Drip Coffee

Espresso is kind of a steal, price-wise. I've never seen espresso much out of the $2 range, probably because café owners instinctively know that people are going to hesitate to spend more than that for such a little cup, unless of course it's alcoholic. Thinking about cost, espresso uses somewhere from 14 to 20 grams for a shot; drip coffee is chronically underdosed, and even at good ratios might range down to 12 grams or less per cup. Plus, coffee waste is higher on espresso due to adjusting the grind, waste at the dosing level, and chucking a bad shot here and there. Then you factor in the cost of espresso machines, grinders, and related equipment, and the training and labor cost of a skilled barista, and that $2 spro is really starting to look like a bargain. But, from the perspective of the drinker, you can get a fairly large coffee for the around the same price, and you know you'll be drinking it for much longer, maybe bulking it out with lots of sugar and cream—so, from the buyer's perspective, spro doesn't necessarily look like the better deal, especially depending on their perception of it. More on that in a second.

This isn't to say that espresso isn't profitable for coffee-house operators; it certainly is, and as an ingredient in more expensive milky drinks it's vital. But, if the majority of customers see drip coffee as what they want, and so don't create a big demand for a variety of high-quality espresso blends & SOs, why should owner/operators invest more in what, by itself, is basically a fringe menu item? This is a serious question, and I know part of the answer is: chicken and egg problem, get better spro options in place and visible and people might come around. Right now the standard set-up in most Buffalo cafés is to just have 2 espressos, regular and decaf. I'd be delighted to see that expand just to 3—keeping the decaf, and then having one blend/bean for milky drinks and another for straight drinking—exciting espressos like the Apollo that started this rant. If that took off, then maybe eventually we'd see the demand for more than one drinking espresso at a time. But, catch-22, by my calculations you probably need to sell somewhere in the vicinity of 500+ straight drinking espressos to pay off the decent grinder you need to make it. Totally doable, but it's a big number when you're comparing grinder prices to your average daily espresso orders.

Atmosphere and Culture

I'm really interested in the atmosphere and culture that allows/demands a good espresso scene. I haven't been able to spend much time people-watching in the major coffee centers of North America, and of course I hear about the espresso scene in the World Where Drip Coffee Never Took Over, aka Not North America (Australia/New Zealand I find particularly intriguing in terms of their coffee scene for some reason). I'd like to see that in action—not to abandon non-espresso coffee in the least, but just because I think espresso is getting a bad rap in most of America, and I'd like to see it on its own turf, where it's the expected way to drink coffee. Spot Coffee is opening a shop up on Hertel, which is very much the Italian part of town, so I'm really crossing my fingers in the hopes that there is a dedicated espresso-loving crowd up there.

I think if I were designing a café to maximize espresso consumption there are a couple things I would do. First, make the process of making it more visible—use lower counters and/or low slung machines so the barista is more visible. When I first switched over to using naked portafilters, I had a brief day-dream of some complex system of mirrors or video-monitors to really show off those extractions—obviously not very practical. I don't really like turning my back to customers, but if there is a way to keep the machine angled so that they can see the shots as they're pulling, great—instead of hiding the action behind a machine that gets between the barista and the customer anyway. Going along with that, use multiple machines if necessary, and really make the bar a comfortable place to sit and drink. Abolish the line phenomena as much as possible; a booze-bar approachability is what you want. To be fair, I've seen lots of shops with smallish floor-space that achieve the right mix of coziness without needing to have a bar seating/serving area.

I don't want to take espresso in a to-go cup, but neither do I want to take it back to my table and sip it slowly for a half-hour: I want to drink it in just a few minutes, chatting with the baristas or other customers. I don't want to wait very long at all for an espresso—that's why it's espresso—but a spro-customer shouldn't feel like they need to keep moving down the line and out the door, either. People who want a complicated flavored 20oz drink or coffee always seem to be in a hurry, and then they'll be sipping it for hours (that's why they want it extra hot), whereas the espresso which must be made and consumed very quickly works better in a more leisurely environment. I think that's irony.

Perception

The public perception of espresso lags behind what we know in the industry, even more so than with other brewing methods. Strong, bitter, and a tiny cup pretty much sums it up for most people and even most cafés, I would guess. The use of “espresso” or, let's say it, eXpresso as a flavor in ice cream etc. has compounded the confusion, as has the focus on caffeine content. Even more than coffee, espresso has a rep as just a caffeine delivery system.

(Side-rant: I just refuse to talk about caffeine content in espresso now. It's certainly there. Does it have more or less than a coffee? Which coffee? By volume, by cup? Are we talking a normal shot or ristretto, what dosing, what roast level? Robusta in the blend? I'm pretty sure a big chunk of the hopped-up-on-espresso effect is psychosomatic, just because it has such a stronger taste than coffee. I'm not even going to talk about it until I can get some scientific testing done on the espresso I serve, and that's not exactly top priority on my list.)

When people do have a little more nuanced conception of espresso, it's almost inevitably based on a stereotype of European-style espresso, usually meaning Italian. I have a distinct memory, from when I was a tyke, of my father explaining what espresso was: it was a tiny cup of black, magically potent coffee, bitter as death, equally well suited to greasing tractor bearings or melting through bank vaults. Wizened Italian men in immaculate suits, the way I pictured my great-grandfather Tomasso, would stir in a pound or so of sugar into these little cups while they discussed “the family”. Fruit or floral notes in the cup would probably be grounds for verbal or physical abuse. Decades later, reading about the “first wave” of Italian-immigrant-driven espresso culture in America, I would have a nice “aha” moment. (And just to bring it full circle, weirdly enough: the town where my great-grandfather settled after immigrating from Italy? Apollo, PA.)

My mother had never had a shot of espresso until I made her one at my shop a while back. She wasn't an instant convert, but her comment sticks with me: “I had no idea espresso tasted like that.” This is a double-ristretto shot, served to someone who likes flavored coffees and lattes, makes coffee at home and uses flavored creamers, goes to Starbucks—in other words, my mom is pretty close to the perfect example of the average American coffee drinker. The idea that espresso is such a complex beverage, that discussions of sweetness and creaminess, specific flavors like fruits, chocolate, and spices are common in the upper-tier coffee world—is completely off the radar of such a coffee drinker. As baristas, we need to make sure we are getting the word out about this stuff, and more importantly getting people to discover these complexities by tasting great espresso.

We need more awesome espressos

When I was first getting really obsessive about coffee, I had three espressos that were kind of game-changing for me. God-shots, if you will. Jay Caragay pulled me a shot of Hines Organic in his Towson, MD library <a location. This was my first exposure to a really deliciously bright spro. A super-friendly barista at the Equal Exchange café in Boston, MA made me an espresso from a blend that was heavy on some Sumatran coffee: utterly mellow, very sweet, with this heavy butter-and-caramel-popcorn taste and mouthfeel that was totally new to me. Finally, I pulled what was, for me, a god-shot of Spot's espresso, totally by accident, just a test shot after doing some maintenance on the machine down at Delaware & Chippewa.

I've had a lot of great shots—probably quite a few that were “objectively better than” the above-mentioned shots, if I could take a time-machine and check them against my current palate. But the point is, those three shots stand out in my memory, they were god-shots when I had'em. The first two showed me two very different and phenomenal directions espresso can go in, totally different than the bitter, comparatively watery shot too often taken for the (Italian?) standard. The shot I pulled at Spot gave me a totally absorbing sensory experience—I was talking/emailing about it for days, it was literally revelatory—and, having shown me what my blend is capable of, made me obsessed with recreating that shot every time.

The thing that bugs me most about the traditional Italian espresso argument is not just that I don't like that style of espresso—I don't think I've had a good Italian espresso. Buy me a ticket to Florence, I'll get a shot of not-stale Illy from a good barista, and I'll let you know. No, the thing that bugs me is the idea that there is one good espresso—one type of blend, one type of preparation. That just hamstrings an awesome medium. Imagine if someone said that wine can come from one kind of grape, it can be made with one specific process, and everything else is not wine, so you might as well just get some vodka and fruit juice, savages. The range of coffees, roasts, and blends that make for good espresso might be narrower than the range that can make a good filter-drip coffee, but it's still pretty large. Listen to the way barista competitors describe their espressos to get just a glimpse of the potential. (Sprudge has a nice list of videos from the WBC).

I understand that barista competitor who said he'd only had a few good espressos in his life. Hopefully that was a little hyperbolic on his part, but really good espresso is often hard to find. When I'm visiting some random café, I don't often get a coffee that is jaw-dropping, but it's usually at least palatable. Not so with espresso!

More so than anything else we serve, I think espresso is a beverage we coffee-people have kind of been keeping to ourselves. I don't know how many hundreds of shots I've had in my few years in the industry—you do it for a little pick-me-up, to check the quality of your product, and because you know that, running around behind the counter, there's a good chance any other drink you make for yourself will be spilled/lost/cold long before you finish it.6 At Spot Elmwood, we're periodically fans of rounds of “shift shots”, which tend to get focused on for their caffeine content—but they also ensure we're all tasting espresso pretty frequently, so even the people who aren't working the bar yet, or who don't normally go for “straight” coffee in any format, get a chance to taste superior vs. inferior espresso.

I raise my demi to an image of the future, where espresso-drinkers rival other coffee-fans in their numbers and nuanced palates, where good espresso is the norm, not the exception, and where 3 or 4 grinders per shop allow us to celebrate many different espressos. Buffalo-area roasters and baristas: we should find a location sometime and do a public espresso tasting. Bring your own blend and grinder and we'll go to town.

Oh, and here's hoping that Nietzschean binaries compel the folks at Counter Culture to craft some dark, winey Espresso Dionysus.