A Real Espresso

There are moments when you discover that an entire industry has quietly normalised something daft.

Mine came while fiddling with the little red Nespresso machine, which was meant to be the escape from fiddling with coffee machines.

The Gaggia has now gone, and the new owner seems happy with it. Good. I hope they enjoy it. It’s a handsome thing, and in the right hands it’ll no doubt produce excellent coffee. Those hands, however, are no longer mine. I have retired from standing in the kitchen before breakfast trying to interpret the emotional state of a damp coffee puck.

The Nespresso arrived dispensing about 40ml for an espresso, which may be correct according to the machine, but looked rather generous to me. In Italy an espresso is a small, sharp event. It arrives, you drink it, and life resumes. Nobody starts cradling it like a pint of mild.

So I reprogrammed it. Hold the button down, release it when there’s enough in the cup, and the machine remembers. Very clever. Also slightly dangerous, because it meant my first act after abandoning coffee faff was to introduce coffee faff.

I cut it down to something nearer 25ml, and annoyingly, it was better. Stronger. Tidier. More like the little Italian espresso I had in mind, and less like the machine had got distracted and left the tap running.

Which does make you wonder why 40ml became the default. I suspect because people like to feel they’re getting a bit more. We’ve trained ourselves to confuse volume with value, which is why coffee chains now sell cups large enough to bail out a dinghy.

The Italians don’t seem to have fallen for this quite so badly. They still produce something small, concentrated and over with before anyone has had time to say mouthfeel.

So yes, the Nespresso has now been optimised. After all that. After the Gaggia, the grinder, the tamping, the cleaning and the solemn vow to simplify my coffee life, I’ve immediately started adjusting the replacement machine.

Still, at least this time the adjustment involved holding down one button rather than joining a forum and pretending to understand pressure curves.