Your Espresso Machine Doesn’t Have to Be Fancy to Make Great Coffee
Coffee is it the original biohack and the nation’s most popular productivity tool. As we adjust to the transition to daylight saving time, they are addicted to caffeine DETAILS The reviews team writes about our favorite coffee making habits and devices. Today, reviewer Peter Cottell explains why espresso machines don’t have to be any fancier than the Casabrews 5700. Check out other Java.Base news about other DETAILS ways of drinking preferred by writers.
There is a motto in the guitar world that says: “the tone is kept in the fingers.” It’s a minimalist idea meant to encourage budding musicians to go in-house to find the perfect guitar sound rather than spending a lifetime and tens of thousands of dollars buying expensive pedals, amps, and a high-end guitar with a boomer signature etched into the title. The strange thing about this speech is that it is often muttered by those who cannot afford such things; think Joe Bonamassa, John Mayer, and James Dolan, whom the guitar world calls “lawyers of the blues.”
Fancy coffee gear can get you a long way, but it’s as useless as a $20,000 Les Paul without art or inspiration. The punk boom of 1977 showed ambitious musicians that they could go far with attitude and initiative. But it was during the equally post-punk boom of the early ’80s that we learned how to use your instrument and keep an open mind can lead to success, financial situations be damned.
In the summer of 2008, I found myself unemployed with a communications degree at a large state college, so I took the next logical step and took a chance on the service industry. Many local coffee shops were the first employer to call me, so I went to become a barista despite the fact that, up to that point, I had drunk a total of 2 cups of coffee in my entire life. I spent the first year drinking cold drinks and working afternoon or evening shifts. Then I got a morning shift, and I had to learn how to dial an espresso machine. And everything changed forever.
I don’t remember the make or model of the machine, but you’ll get an idea of its condition and functionality if you imagine a local second-wave store with a rugged GVC aesthetic, a cluttered bulletin board full of business cards from sex parasites turned yoga instructors, and a silly name like Jammin’ Java or Expresso Express. In the beginning, “dialing” consisted of moving the size of the grinder until you spit out a bunch of grounds that ejected the gun anywhere between 20 and 40 seconds. There was no scale, and the temperature and pressure of the machine was a mystery, and no one cared about any of this because most of the espresso drinks we sold were poured with DaVinci syrup and 2 percent milk. It wasn’t until the hammer came down on everyone after an overdose of over the counter expensive sugary drinks that I was forced to reckon with espresso. I spent the next three years looking for a way to coax something drinkable from this accursed, faltering machine, and finally came to the same conclusion as many before me: Espresso is universal. It is the basic unit of caffeine. The binary code of the coffee world. The bottom brick of everything earthy, spicy, brown, and rich.
After my stint in a rundown restaurant in Ohio, I moved across the country and graduated to a coffee shop bakery in Portland, Oregon. Although it wasn’t a third-wave shop, it was close enough to a minister in the scene like Heart and Stumptown, so we took coffee as seriously as possible. The morning group was responsible for dialing in three different grinders: decaf, blend, and single origin. The pre-dawn commute in the quiet fog was meditative, no matter how bloated I was, and the process of taking notes while sipping a shot and adjusting the grinder and time to slow down is a morning routine I would return to every day if I could. Then a co-worker arrives, the stereo turns from ambient techno to Electric Wizard, customers trickle in, and all hell breaks loose. You become one with the machine.
