The Secrets to Making the Perfect Espresso

10 April 2015
 Categories: , Blog

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As a café owner, your business will live and die by the quality of the coffee that you serve, and the very best way for any business to gain a great reputation, is by offering a fantastic product. The café market is saturated, and to stand out from every other café and coffee shop in your town, you simply need to serve up coffee that blows the competition out of the water. This might sound easy, but it's not. Your greatest test comes with making a great espresso. Coffee lovers everywhere can taste the difference between an espresso that is substandard and an espresso that really hits the mark – here is how you can make yours the very best in town.

Only Use Fresh Beans

As with most things, fresher is most definitely better when it comes to espresso. Espresso drinkers love to get that pure hit of the coffee bean, and if you use beans months after they have been roasted, a lot of that delicious flavour from the roast will have evaporated. As you are a coffee shop serving coffee every day, you shouldn't need to sit on coffee beans for a long period of time, so there is no excuse not to use the fresh stuff.

Grind the Beans Yourself

Most people who enjoy making espresso at home will buy their coffee ready ground for the sake of convenience. But for a café owner, convenience is not the most important thing, it is offering the best possible product. Therefore, you should look into purchasing some slick barista coffee equipment, and specifically your very own coffee grinder. First of all, this ensures that you are always using freshly ground beans for your espresso. Secondly, the coarseness of the grind can really change an espresso. If it's too coarse, your espresso might be too watery, and if the grind is too fine, your coffee could actually burn. With your own coffee grinder, you can play around until you reach a consistency of grind that is perfect for you and your customers.

Attention to Tamping

All great baristas wanting to create delicious espresso need to pay attention to tamping also. Tamping is the process of compacting the ground coffee before brewing, and this is important because this will ensure that the hot water from your machine permeates through the coffee grounds evenly, extracting the very best brew. Aluminium tampers are generally considered to be desirable, and plastic tampers less so.

For more information, contact Coffee Tech.