It’s almost Christmas. Families are gathering and prepare for celebrations the warmest time of the year. And what a better start of the day than having a beautifully tasty shot of espresso. You bring your beans, distribute them in the basket of the portafilter, Mount the portafilter on the machine and push the button. Everything is perfect, but… your first sip is bitter. Your beautiful morning is over. But what could have gone wrong…
😁
Well, enough for this post opening. I’m sure that no one brews awfully bitter espresso at home and still enjoying the moment. But, you can sometimes experience some bitterness in your shots and you cannot be sure where this comes from. Let’s see what you can improve.
I’m starting with one of my favorite espresso coffees available in the online store I’m buying from. These beans tend to have very pronounced chocolate and toffee flavors, a very typical espresso taste, and the espressos I brew are very balanced and enjoyable.
Of course the first thing to do is to grind your beans just before brewing, but I tend repeating this all over again and today’s post isn’t focused on this.
Next thing that I do is to distribute the ground beans evenly with the homemade WDT tool. This also isn’t the thing to focus on. If your beans aren’t distributed evenly, some channeling may occur, the coffee is gonna be under extracted and most probably taste a bit sour-ish. We need some other adjustment in order to reduce the bitterness.
We are just at the moment when we start brewing our coffee… but what about the temperature? The temperature of the water used for brewing the coffee… Can it be so crucial about the taste of the coffee? Well, yes it can!
Darker roasts typically don’t like very hot water and the reason of that is because these beans extract easily. When your beans are easier to extract it becomes a lot easier to over extract your shot. Moreover, the bitter components also extract a lot easier with the higher temperature, and you end up with coffee that doesn’t have all the sweetness and flavor, and in the same time tastes bitter.
This is not only to be applied for espresso brews. Every method you use to brew your coffee will benefit of this temperature “hack”. If you want to remove a part of the bitterness, you go with lower water temperature.
Most of the espresso machines will have some water temperature adjustment, and yet if your equipment is among the cheap one, you may not be able to alter it. Luckily, my Delonghi Dedica has this ability, and when I brew darker roasts like the Brazil Aliança I set the water at about 88 degrees Celsius, which is the lowest available option. It’s good if you have some sort of espresso machine to view the manual and check if there’s an option to reduce the brewing temps.
I did this adjustment just recently, as I didn’t like the results that much, and it really helped to reduce the bitterness in my cup. My mornings became just a bit more enjoyable.
It’s interesting that you cannot change so much things in order to achieve the best possible cup of coffee with a given gear and every little step is important. I think everyone can build up his habits and every adjustment will become natural and in a matter of thine you will not think of it.
I feel like every single day throughout this year I learned something more about coffee and all of this so vast. The deeper you go into this ocean, the more complex it becomes, but having a general knowledge about your favorite drink will definitely result in better tasting cups and as a consequence- a more enjoyable coffee mornings.
Stay happy, stay healthy and enjoy your coffee time.
Bye! see you soon!