Your Espresso Machine Doesn’t Have to Be Fancy to Make Good Coffee
Coffee is the original biohack and the country’s most popular productivity tool. As we adjust to Daylight Saving Time, caffeine addicts CABLE The reviews team writes about our favorite coffee brewing routines and appliances. Today, reviewer Peter Cottell explains why espresso machines don’t have to be fancier than a Casabrews 5700. Look for more Java.Base stories on others CABLE writers’ favorite brewing methods.
There is a saying in the guitar world that “sound is stored in the fingers.” It’s a reductive notion that’s meant to encourage beginning shredders to seek out an ideal guitar tone that suits them best rather than spending a lifetime and tens of thousands of dollars on high-end pedals, amps, and guitars with a boomer’s signature engraved on the headstock. The irony of this phrase is that it is usually muttered by the very people who can afford such equipment; think of Joe Bonamassa, John Mayer and James Dolan, whom the guitar world calls “blues lawyers.”
Fancy coffee equipment can get you pretty far, but it’s as useless as a $20,000 Les Paul with no technique or inspiration. The punk boom of 1977 showed ambitious musicians that they could go pretty far with attitude and initiative. But it was amid the egalitarian post-punk boom of the early ’80s that we learned that practicing your instrument and keeping an open mind can lead to transcendence, financial circumstances be damned.
In the summer of 2008, I found myself unemployed with a communications degree from a large state university. So I took the next logical step and moved into the service industry. A local coffee chain was the first employer to call me back, so I left to become a barista even though I had consumed a total of 2 cups of coffee in my entire life up to that point. I spent the first year drinking cold beer and working afternoons or evenings. Then I was transferred in the morning and had to learn how to dial in an espresso machine. And everything changed forever.
I don’t remember the make or model of the machine, but you’ll get a sense of its form and function by imagining a local second-wave store with a tattered GVC aesthetic, a crowded bulletin board overrun with business cards of sex pests turned yoga instructors, and a silly alliterative name like Jammin’ Java or Expresso Express. At first, “dial-in” consisted of changing the grind size on the grinder until it spit out a pile of grounds that gave a grind between 20 and 40 seconds. There was no scale, and the machine’s temperature and pressure specifications were a mystery, and no one cared because most of the espresso drinks we sold were laced with DaVinci syrup and 2 percent milk. It wasn’t until the hammer came down on everyone behind the overconsumption of expensive sugary drinks at the counter that I was forced to reckon with espresso. I spent the next three years figuring out how to extract something drinkable from that cursed, faltering machine, and ultimately 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 lower brick of all things earthy, bitter, brown and rich.
After my stint at a failing coffee shop in Ohio, I moved across the country and graduated to a bakery-cafe hybrid in Portland, Oregon. Even though it wasn’t a true third-wave shop, we were close enough to scene mainstays like Heart and Stumptown that we took coffee as seriously as possible. The morning shift was tasked with putting together three different grinds: decaffeinated, a blend, and a single origin. Commuting to work before dawn in the silent fog was a meditative experience, no matter how hungover I was, and the process of taking notes while sipping shots and ever-so-slightly adjusting the grinder and extraction time is a morning ritual I would return to daily if I could. Then your colleague arrives, the stereo switches from ambient techno to Electric Wizard, the customers slowly arrive and all hell breaks loose. You become one with the machine.
