Why does every cafe around me have acidic espresso?
It’s like an epidemic. I’ve tried like 4-5 cafes now and it’s all like drinking battery acid. Do they just not care? Or do you think they believe it’s meant to be like this? If that’s the case I feel bad for them.
Find an Italian place. Or an old mom and pop shop. Or you can always lick some of the burnt tires that you find along the highway if you really miss the taste of that robusta shot. /s
To each their own. No need to crap on what other people like.
I’m a roaster. Part of it is that people put so much importance into making coffee with freshly roasted beans. when you roast beans they give off co2. Ideally you want to let the beans sit for a day or 2 to degas. It’s the same reason seltzer water has an acidic taste, it’s full of co2
That’s part of it. The other part, however, is more neglect than anything else. They dial in their grinder for the first batch, and that’s it. Never again. That’s fine for that batch and, sometimes the next, but it starts losing calibration after a while. Add that to the fact that each batch needs to be dialed in for pique flavor, and you get crappy, often times acidic or sour, pulls.
I prefer it that way; my wife is like you. Classic espresso with the darker roasted and more bitter profile is not pleasant to me, but my wife will say it’s perfect; and what I like, she can’t stand.
For almost ten years now I’ve been encountering lots of drip coffee with some kind of “rotten” flavor note to it.
It’s vaguely like hops in a way. A funky note, similar (experientially; I understand it doesn’t come from the same process or ingredients) to what a wheat beer has that other beers don’t.
Tons of oils. And the darker they’re roasted, the more the oils come out and get exposed to oxygen and get rancid. Once you identify the smell, you can’t unsmell it. These oils stick to everything, especially plastic coffee drippers.
The “break room smell” I’m referring to is the lingering, heavy, overpowering stink of rancid coffee clinging to everything in a break room where the 20-year-old company dripper have gurgles along every morning, that has never seen any cleaning more advanced than a quick rinse of the glass jar.
I mean, almost all coffee that’s not freshly ground and brewed in a perfectly clean machine is rancid anyway. I know people who actually associate this taste with coffee itself, and won’t enjoy a cup until their moka pot has been “properly seasoned”.
Your grandma’s drip coffee? Rancid. From the vending machine at work or in a gas station? Rancid. Every single preground package at the store? Rancid. From your brother-in-law’s $2k bean-to-cup machine? You guessed it, rancid. The 10yo nespresso you salvaged from a friend to bring at your desk? Boy you don’t wanna know how much crap gets trapped inside over the years.
It’s the fermentation process. You’ll find it more in natural processed coffees or honey processed. Even more so with anaerobic fermentation or yeast based fermentation.
What you’re looking for is washed coffee, or commodity coffee with no mention of the processing. Or dark roasts, as the taste of heavily roasted coffee will negate a lot of the taste that is inherent to the bean and the processing. A bit like a well-done steak.
If all the coffee shops in your area serve unbearably sour espresso, there might be 2 possibilities: either all of them suck and can’t properly extract a light roast, or you might be hypersensitive to acidity. Personally, I love acidity and I enjoy fruity, pleasantly acidic espresso as much as sweet, chocolatey shots, but I get that for a lot of people, “coffee” tastes burnt and bitter.
Coffee is naturally acidic. Very acidic. Acid compounds are also among the fastest to extract. The lighter the roast, the harder it is to extract most of the coffee, therefore light roasts tend to be more acidic than more heavily roasted beans. Light roasts are all the rage ATM because they respect the beans’ origin and characteristics and highlight rather than hide the specificity of high quality beans. The more you roast, the more you lose the original character of the beans and get burnt flavors (this is why most commercial coffee is heavily roasted, the more you burn it, the more you hide the flaws of you cheap, commodity shitty beans).
Espresso extraction follows a curve :
First drips: salty and very thick
under-extraction: sour and thick
sweet-spot: sweet, chocolaty and syrupy
over-extraction: bitter, watery.
Since roast levels affect the ease of extraction, the same ratio on a light roast and a dark roast will be wildly different. a 2:1 ratio for a light roast would be still way under-extracted, therefore a longer ratio should be used to get some sweetness to compensate for sourness, and get a slightly acidic shot (2.5:1 to 3:1 ratio should be fine). Dark roasts will overextract much quicker and get bitter much sooner, and therefore should be shorter to be palatable. A medium roast should be in the Goldilocks zone at a 2:1 or slightly longer ratio.
TL;DR: ask for a longer shot or a medium roast if you want less acidity and more sweetness and chocolatey flavors, a traditional dark roast blend with up to 20% robusta if you enjoy old school bitter espresso, or drown it in dairy, sugar and spices.
Are You adding milk, a few shots of syrup, some cocoa powder and a whip cream topping? Most Americans find this cuts down on the acid and the shops are likely catering primarily to them. Also, machines that are not kept clean can build an acidic taste. Ask them if they have an espresso with some robusta blend. I prefer these over pure aribica espressos as they have a more well rounded, less acidic profile.
Acidity might have its place in an Americano or dairy drink, where it’s diluted down. But in an espresso shot, or worse yet, a ristretto? Hard pass. If I want to put something in my mouth that shrivels my intestines and makes my butthole pucker up, I might as well munch on a lemon. Fully on board with @CodingCarpenter here.
There’s an entire universe of coffee between currently fashionable pale roasts and typical Starbucks destroyed black beans. That is not the alternative.
I’ll use them as a last resort, but not worth the money. The cold Americano is just about the only thing that I can drink that tastes ok, all other drinks are indeed bitter. I guess they are intended to be drunk with sugar.
When it comes to fast food chains, honestly the McDonald’s coffee is the best of the bunch. Their flat whites are not bad at all.
My favourite mass market coffee is Lavazza Cafe Oro which is a medium dark roast. I drink it black in both espresso and french press and it has excellent flavour and no burnt flavours
I recommend you try some medium roasts before condemning everything darker than light.
Coffee that doesn’t mention its roast is usually medium
I have. Medium roasts are fine; it’s just that the darker the roast, the more bitterness and smoke (“roasty”) dominate the flavors. It’s like coconut milk: it’s fine in piña coladas and coconut shrimp; everywhere else, it just makes whatever it’s put into taste like coconut. While it’s an exaggeration to say that it’s all I taste, it’s sort of true in that its all I notice because I find it unpleasant.
How dare you! Seriously though I’m all for acidity it is needed for good coffee. But it should not hurt my mouth or throat lol. Espresso doesn’t need to be burnt, I think it just tastes that way sometimes because people lean toward dark roasts as they are so much easier to brew.
I don’t think I’ve ever tasted coffee that acidic, although once I roasted just barely past the first crack and it was a bit sour. I thought it wasn’t bad, TBH; I got a lot more flavor variety out of it, but usually I go a bit farther and try to hit second crack during cooldown. I stopped the roast on my current batch at the second crack, and it’s far darker than I prefer. At that point all I taste is bitter and smoke.
Maybe the difference is that I don’t generally drink espresso; I use my Elektra to make cappuccinos, and then I’m not doing that, I drink cold brew. Bitterness overwhelms all other flavors for me, so I do everything I can to avoid it.
Same, all of those third wave specialty hypetrain shops serve unpalatable crap. It’s acceptable in a dairy drink as they mellow down the flavors, but that’s not what I think “special” should imply.
You know where you get a decent espresso? Some Italian ice cream parlor. And they didn’t inflate the prices as much either, since it’s not their core product.
I did find a good shop in an Italian bakery. That’s a good tip. The one I visited today though was all up their own ass about roasting their own beans and doing off the equipment but I’m the end it was terrible
Yep. Can’t speak for all of them of course, but the ones around me increased the price of an ice cream scoop from 50 cents to over 2 bucks, but the espresso didn’t even go up 20% in the same time.
Probably they’re more focused on their milk drinks. The milk really fills the acid, making the whole thing nicely tangy. Not really an excuse tho - if they have espresso on the menu it should be good.
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