Coffee Data Science
Single Sifter Staccato Espresso
A simple hack
Since developing the staccato espresso shot, I have experimented with different ways to layer coffee to get a similar effect as staccato. The staccato shot is layer sifted coffee, but one challenge is that sifting takes time. So I wanted to look at a way to speed it up.
While trying to understand sifting by doing a salami sift, I found the smaller particles get sifted out first. So when sifting using a 500um screen, the particles less than 200um come out first. This means that you could use a single sifter screen to make a staccato shot. You could even use a single screen to roughly re-orient all the coffee from smallest to largest.
I started with a 500um sieve, and I knew based on the grind, that I should sift out 10g of coffee. This would be the fine layer. I kept sifting until there was nothing more to sift which was about 3g fine. There was 10g coarse left over, so that would be coarse.
I looked at the particle distributions, and they were very unimodal. There was some overlap of course, but they were separated better than using three grind settings.
I pulled the shot, and the color was typical staccato. It ran a little too fast, but it was still an interesting shot.
This small experiment opens the door a bit in terms of the equipment needed to make good staccato espresso. I’m now curious to know if I can reorient an entire puck using a single coarse sifter, like 800um.
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