Now that we’ve explored the potential for automation to affect all of the usual variables of espresso and milk production, it’s time to delve into the finer details of espresso making.

Naturally, we’ll start at the beginning with the most important variable of all: dose (aka powder weight, or cake thickness). In my first post I covered the importance of keeping dose steady and how a machine can excel at the task. I’m sure we all agree it’s important, but we also need to know how to leverage it to create a recipe.

Coffee recipes should be optimised to produce the best balance of flavour. When foods or drinks are balanced, they aren’t too sour or too bitter. No bad tastes stand out, and the interaction of tastes is harmonious. It also means the foods or drinks don’t dry your mouth or impart undesirable textural sensations. Recipe designers for a cafe taste-test until they find a formula that is balanced in flavour. The recipe designer might be a head barista in a cafe, or it might even be the person who roasted the coffee. If baristas can preserve the integrity of a recipe, their shots will be balanced. 

The amount of coffee in a recipe determines the size and strength of a shot as well as how much the drink costs to make.

Espresso filter baskets come in many different sizes for a reason. It isn’t much different from the way a cook may measures out a quantity by volume, in a half cup or a quarter cup. Common sizes are 7 g, 15 g, 18 g, 20 g, 22 g, and 25 g. Luckily for us, the Eversys machines have brewing chambers that can span this full range. This allows for complete freedom when designing a recipe, and flexibility when using multiple coffees (especially useful if you take advantage of the powder chute).

Of all the variables in espresso making, changes to dose are the only ones that have a significant financial impact. Heating hot water with your espresso machine is a cost, but the coffee grinds cost the cafe around twenty times as much. Therefore, the dose must be accurate because the price you charge customers is determined by the quantity you dose. Imagine a cafe that uses 16 g of coffee beans to produce a double shot. What would happen if the baristas in the cafe accidentally used just 2 g of extra coffee every time they produced an espresso, for a whole year? It’s a 12.5% increase in dosing. After a year of making 400 coffees per day, the cafe could generate a coffee bill that is US$5,000 higher than it should be. (A typical cafe at this level of drink making spends approximately US$40,000 annually on wholesale beans from a specialty coffee roaster.)

More coffee grinds in a recipe means we can make more espresso, or we can make the same amount of espresso stronger. In the next post I’ll cover how we can measure and optimise this variable on Eversys machines.

To the boundaries of coffee,