Clean S.O. Espresso

One of the things about keeping a blog and being in coffee for a long time is that trends can come back. If you wait long enough, the old is new again.

This crisp Sunday after a nice busy Saturday at Broadway, a customer named pulled me aside to tell me the espresso was really good. He introduced himself as Jay, asked what was in it and pointed out that he lives over in Porter Square and that “everywhere the shots are burnt.”

His words, not mine.

We talked for a bit. It was actually a little hard to keep up. Jay was excited and talking quickly, the clockwork espresso was doing its thing, and he was ahead of me on several points. It took me a minute to catch up.

But somewhere in the middle of the conversation I realized something:

There’s still a lot out there that can be done with espresso and can still be exciting.

Lately we’ve been getting more customers coming in and talking about shots. Ordering straight espresso. Asking questions. Paying attention.

For me, it's brought back two moments that really shaped how I think about espresso. The first was back in 2006 I took a trip to New York to visit my friend Chris Owens, who was working at 9th Street Espresso at the time. I was coming from Boston, where most espresso was dark roasted Brazilian coffee or something close to a black and tan (French roast cut half and half with lighter roast).

The espresso scene was dark and the shots were long.

Chris had recently been to Scandinavia for a barista event (I think it was the Nordic Barista Cup) and he had done a café crawl while he was there. When he came back he had smuggled a bag of coffee with him.

It was a blend of extremely expensive coffees:

Guatemala Huehuetenango El Injerto, a Rwanda Golden Cup, and another coffee in the mix. Back then coffees like that would almost always have been reserved for filter brewing. The conventional wisdom from a lot of respected people in the industry was that coffees like that simply wouldn’t work as espresso.

They would have recommended brewing them on a Technivorm not an espresso.

But Chris pulled the shots.

They had structure.

They were layered.

They were clean.

They were beautiful.

I had pulled good shots before, on Synessos, on home setups, in cafés, but I had never tasted anything that intentional. That well paired.

It stuck with me enough that I later wrote about that experience here.

The second key moment for me was taking that inspiration forward few years to 2008. Once I had actually been trained in roasting and wasn’t just trying to make the best out of other people’s coffees or blends, I started developing my own philosophy around espresso and chose to test apply it then and there in one gloriously crazy event.

I set up a espresso tasting event at Simon’s Coffee Shop. I had been the manager there and helped build the coffee program that put that café on the rails it still runs on today. The café had this monster 4 group linea that used pstats to determine the Temps. I had to dial in the left 2 groups to one temp and the right two to another, then have four espresso dialed in for the event.

Heres my memory of the four different espressos served:

• Two Ethiopian coffees paired together

• A single-origin estate Kenya

• Panama Esmeralda Geisha

• And a classic Brazil–Yirgacheffe blend

The shots ranged from $3 up to $9, which at the time was beyond wild. We had several pounds of each coffee in the hoppers. 

We went through all of it.

People would get in line, take a shot, go wow, step aside… then get right back in line and order another from the lineup. It was amazing.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you people don’t want to try interesting things. People want experiences. That event even got covered by some local press, either The Dig or The Boston Phoenix. Unfortunately there’s almost no record of it now, but I did write about it as a feeding frenzy at the bar.

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Over the years I’ve done guest espressos, single-origin espressos on bar, espresso events, lots of experiments and a lot of fun in my owm shops. But scenes move in cycles. Things get popular, then they quiet down, then they come back in new ways.

Talking with Jay today, he was pushing me that people want this and that “If you build it, they will come.”

Field of Dreams quote aside, he's right. He was making the case that there’s still an audience for this. That people are curious. That people want to taste these things and care again.

Maybe he’s right. So I’m going to take that seriously and follow through. I’m going to start slotting some single-origin espressos on the bar at Broadway and see what happens. I already dialed in the Peru Cajamaru as a shot at 364 Broadway, Cambridge. It will be on the menu shortly but you can ask for it if you drop by.

Right now, I have the grinders and kit setup but I pulled the Linea PB off bar to service it. In the meantime I got a GS3 as a backup so it will be a bit slow during rushes but gotta do a full descale and clean on the Linea PB to get it peak.

Because the Boston scene has been in a lull for a little while and maybe it's time to have fun again. Rekindle my love of espresso and just go for it.

Give me a couple weeks to get everything set up. Stop by 364 Broadway Cambridge and see what you think the difference is between a single-origin espresso and a two bean blend blend.

Kettle gicleur and Hario Japan

At WBUR'S CitySpace event, one intrepid coffee enthusiast brought attention to my foray into kettle gicleurs. We called them Kettle flow restrictors but they were essentially snap in Teflon pieces to adapt the hot water flow out of the Hario beehive or buono kettles. It was high temp Teflon precision machined and designed to narrow the flow rate so you just tip the kettle to a 45 degree angle and get a perfect slow flow without all the balancing of the kettles. It took away the focusing so hard aspect and allowed you to get it just right. This made a lot of sense for v60 because there is no real restriction beyond grind/dose and flow rate of water, pour too fast and too much water will run through.

Mind you, this was a time when dark roasts were still everywhere, roast dates were rare, and labeling coffee like a French wine label was considered novel. Many of the leaders we now think of as legends were advocating batch brew and were quite skeptical of per-cup brewing. The push was toward buying a high-end drip machine, not standing there with a kettle and doing it manually like we did. It was a wild moment where experimenting with pourover sometimes felt like we were swimming upstream.

That kettle flow restrictor really was a thing for a while and we sold a ton of them until it just faded for us. More people started copying us and selling them so we just stopped. It was a heck of a throw back though for one of the dozens of coffee attendees to bring up something from a specific time frame like that. Check out our shelves from that era, selling siphon!

Back then, we were part of a wave in 2008 to that brought Japanese coffee gear from Japan like siphon, kettles, and v60 by hario into the thoughts and hearts of a lot of coffee people who were pontificating about our American coffee scene and what to do next in coffee. While we definitely were the voice evangelizing it in the early years, we inadvertently got involved in bringing a bunch of gear in through varying channels as we advocated for it and for a while we were trying to establish a gear business based on the demand we were seeing.

I even made a trip to Japan and visited Hario headquarters but could not convince them to sell to us. I am pretty sure I wrote in barista magazine about the trip and do still have the photos on my Flickr which I've included below in this post. Check out the glass violin from the Hario headquarters museum!

I think in the end though the demand and attention sparked Hario into opening hario usa but it was the first wave of gear into the states before so many start ups and others began making competing gear. Now there is a huge selection of gear options that solve the problems we identified and an explosion of quality kits to noodle around with. Gone are the days of gear smuggling in suitcases from Tokyo mega coffee stores.

Shout out to that attendee for bringing me back to that headpsace for a bit.

WBUR CitySpace event

Last night we set up at WBUR'S CitySpace for a pop up. The format was interesting in that I got an hour to serve coffee while people arrived for the event. Honestly not knowing the scale of the event, I chose a brew method that wasn't built for speed or capacity, the Siphon.

It's a throw back for me because it was one of my favorite methods back in my early coffee days. We'd get together and brew on a hario TCA 2 cup and load it up with coffee to evaluate roast issues and character. So much stronger than a cupping that you could really see the issues in a coffee.

Back then we (barismo bloggers) had a reputation of being known for this method to the point that I got invited out to the west coast to present a bar doing just siphon. It was my first major event I traveled out of Boston for and would turn out to be a who's who of the next decade of specialty coffee. This being nearly 20 years ago now, it was back when the coffee community was just starting to do throw downs and barista jams.

So maybe it was a reach to be trying to set that up in a situation where I didn't have an idea of how many people would attend or be interested in tasting coffee at night but I gave it a shot on the idea of bringing it back to basics.

So siphon brew on one side and to give contrast, I put the same coffee (Colombia El Plan) as our cold brew on the other. So attendees went from the basic clean coldbrew to the heavy dosed siphon for contrast. The idea being the coldbrew we do is clean and more like regular coffee where the siphon will have all that structure and layers of flavor. It worked really well and we got a huge response from it. I haven't really ever gotten so many good high level coffee questions in an event that wasn't pro.

Afterwards, there was a panel and some seriously good conversations. I got to swing a mic around and answer some solid topics. It was great fun but my takeaway was that the coffee scene in Boston is in a position to get a bit of a revival.