Coffee Data Science
Your Espresso Beginner’s Guide: Quick Start Edition
Another take for your pleasure
If you take a survey of espresso guides, and you will find many issues for beginners even for myself as someone more advanced. So you may want a quick guide to help you start faster. While you will find my notes about other guides below, I put the most important information up front.
There are four variables you can influence without buying anything else:
- Roast age: let your coffee rest for 3 weeks post roast for medium roasts.
- Grind finer! Gauge the fineness of your grind with flour and salt.
- Reducing headspace reduces channeling. Dose until your coffee is above the lip of the basket before tamping.
- Wait 5 minutes to drink the your shot. Your tongue can’t taste drinks above 50C (122F). I aim for between 30C (86F) and 50C (122F).
Criticism of Other Beginner Guides
You can search out any ten beginner guides for espresso. You may find them to be overwhelming with information that does not necessary help making an espresso shot in the moment like:
- The history of coffee
- Coffee processing
- Coffee roasting
- Milk Texturing
- Latte art
- All of these things are important, but too much information at once can overwhelm you.
You may find the best guide for beginners comes with the Flair Espresso machine. The guide is tailored for their machine, but it is clear and concise. You will find their machine good for a beginner considering the entire user experience.
This is the original artwork I made in a hurry to send over to Pull & Pour with whom I collaborated on the first image.
If you like, follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram where I post videos of espresso shots on different machines and espresso related stuff. You can also find me on LinkedIn. You can also follow me on Medium and Subscribe.
Further readings of mine:
My Second Book: Advanced Espresso
My First Book: Engineering Better Espresso
