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.
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.
