Too much of a good thing? Today’s conventional coffee wisdom says “more is more”
Posted by TheShot on 11 Aug 2010 | Tagged as: Barista, Machine, Quality Issues
Today Tim Wendelboe — World-Barista-Champion-turned-microroaster (and major influencer of the recently reviewed Espresso Lab Microroasters) — posted a rather thorough first-thoughts review of the new La Marzocco Strada on his official blog: Tim Wendelboe » Blog Archive » La Marzocco Strada – first thoughts. Of particular interest are some of his insights about the machine’s sensitivities and peculiarities regarding pressure profiling — the holy-grail-du-jour of cutting-edge espresso machine pushers and the people who fawn over them. To briefly quote him in the post:
“I think one needs to have a clear vision of what the espresso should taste like before one starts playing with profiles.”
Recent coffee industry drooling over pressure profiling is just one of the latest examples illustrating how much the industry currently values experimentation over standards and convention. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it comes with tradeoffs. And conventional wisdom of the quality coffee industry did not always lean this way.
For example, I use a manual lever espresso machine at home — and have for many years. And for many years, even going back to the 1990s, many respected experts at the time told you that your best espresso — whether made at home or in a professional coffeehouse — should be made with a semi-automatic machine that controlled the pressure of the pulled shots. Use a pump; set it and forget it. The conventional wisdom back then?: allowing the machine to fix the pressure made for one less variable where the barista could screw things up.
This wasn’t necessarily bad logic, considering that espresso is a notoriously fickle product of many steps where something can go terribly wrong at every turn. After all, it’s for this reason we made espresso our yardstick for judging retailers who make coffee.
But more control always seems like a good thing until you might step back and question the results. The California Initiative System may have seemed like an awesome idea until you look back and see how it’s made our state ungovernable. This philosophical flip-flop towards pressure control illustrates how much we’ve swung the pendulum in the opposite direction. Without question, at some point in the future, we will come full circle again.
2 Comments »
You might be tempted to think that pressure profiling was abandoned for good reasons, but you’d be wrong. Nothing exists in the coffee universe until someone from the third-wave discovers it. So, for instance, pour-over coffee was actually invented only about two years ago, and siphon brewing about five years before that. And although the Strada looks suspiciously like a 1970′s GS3 with a few added gewgaws, it’s really the other way around — that is, we have to conclude that third-wavers *traveled back in time* and tried to jump-start the movement by seeding paddle-groups in the misty past. Hence, they aren’t covering old ground, they’re resurrecting their own genius ideas.
That was rather amusing. Thanks!