How to Make Better Tasting Espresso at Home

I’ve come to realize something recently, about espresso making. You could call it a revelation, or an epiphany, or just “something I’ve just realized”, which doesn’t sound quite as dramatic ;-).

What I’ve figured out is that there is basically one main cause of bad tasting espresso at home which is often prevalent regardless of the home barista having ticked all of the other necessary boxes for great tasting espresso at home. 

This isn’t an obvious one for most people, and I suspect that many people have been dogged by this issue in the past which has led them to invest in new equipment when actually it’s an issue which can usually be fixed with just a few little tweaks to your espresso-making process. 

Before we get onto this, I’ll first go through all of the more obvious necessities for making great tasting espresso, because dealing with the issue I’m referring to here is only really going to make a significant impact once all these checkboxes are ticked. 

Quality Coffee Beans

If you’re buying your coffee beans from coffee roasters, or from speciality coffee websites or subscriptions, then you can skip past this section, as I’d be preaching to the converted. 

If, however, you’re reading this and you usually pick up your coffee beans from a supermarket, or you buy them from a large online retailer, then you might benefit from reading this section of the post. 

To the uninitiated, coffee beans are coffee beans – but that’s just not right. For a start, coffee beans aren’t even beans, they’re seeds – we call them beans, mainly because humans are daft ;-).

The first wave of coffee, which began in the 1800s, saw coffee become a commodity, and the bulk of coffee traded worldwide is still commodity coffee. This kind of coffee is just coffee, just as wheat is just wheat, and oil is just oil. It’s simply priced by the market, quality doesn’t come into it – and it’s very cheap. It’s incredibly difficult for farmers to turn a profit due to the volatile and often very low market price of coffee. 

If you think “coffee just tastes of coffee” this is because you’ve probably been brought up on commodity coffee, as most of us have been. This kind of coffee is usually roasted fairly dark to hide taste defects and to ensure each batch tastes the same, and it all tends to be much of a muchness where taste is concerned.

The second wave of coffee started in the 70s, when firms like Starbucks tapped into a new developing coffee culture. The second wave coffee was a lot more about the experience than it was about the coffee itself, and the third wave of coffee came about in the 80’s starting out as a very small niche of people who were a lot more interested in the coffee beans themselves rather than the coffee culture.

The third wave of coffee is all about the quality of the coffee beans. The beans produced for this market aren’t priced by the market, they’re priced by cup quality, and this allows coffee farmers to make quality led decisions rather than price lead decisions. Where the coffee is grown, the varietals chosen, hand picking vs mechanical picking, and the processing methods used are all picked with one thing in mind, cup quality. 

If you want to ensure you’re buying great quality coffee beans, it’s simple – buy your coffee from a coffee roaster or a specialist supplier of speciality coffee. 

There are hundreds of small batch speciality coffee roasters in the UK, you probably have one locally if you wanted to pop in, and most of them are really cool people, friendly and helpful, and love talking about coffee.