Tips
Ask several websites about espresso cup size and you'll probably get a different set of millilitres from each. No international standard fixes how much a ristretto or a lungo should be, or how big the cup should be. What exists are conventions, and they don't measure the same thing.
Élodie Fontaine
Tips
Your machine's grounds drawer fills up every day, and each time you empty it the same question comes back: what to do with used coffee grounds, apart from binning them? Short answer: compost first, everything else with limits. Here's how to recycle coffee grounds properly, with sources and dates....
Julien Mercier
Tips
Milk that boils doesn't make better foam. It makes foam that collapses, plus a cooked-milk note espresso won't hide. The useful cappuccino milk temperature sits in a narrow window, and that window closes well before boiling.
Julien Mercier
Tips
Your shot has finished, you knock the portafilter out over the bin, and the puck drops. Give it two seconds before you throw it away. A hole in the middle, a soaked surface, one edge paler than the other: that spent puck is a record of the channeling that just happened in your basket. This isn't...
Élodie Fontaine
Tips
A normal espresso is already diluted. That isn't an accident. It's pulled to be drunk hot, at exactly that strength. Pour it over ice and you're adding water to a drink that already has plenty. So your iced espresso ends up thin instead of tasting like the shakerato from an Italian bar. The...
Élodie Fontaine
Tips
A bottomless portafilter doesn't make your espresso better. It takes the spout off, and the spout was hiding what your puck had already been doing. Diagnostic window, not a performance part, which is probably why it disappoints plenty of buyers.
Julien Mercier
Tips
The reflex "the softer the water, the better" is wrong. It's the first thing to fix when you're choosing water for an espresso machine: too hard and it furs up the heating circuit, too soft and it under-extracts into a flat cup.
Julien Mercier
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