Extroverted and Introverted Espresso

It is quite a few months ago – while enjoying a small space and a wonderful coffee – that I was reminded that extravagance and simplicity, as a form of expression, are not at all related, but in their contents they are not necessarily different and even at times it might be impossible to differentiate between the two. Hence I wish to speak in this context from an extroverted and an introverted  espresso way.

Around the middle of the 19th century the French had shown the idea of an espresso machine. They displayed a prototype at the 4th World Fair in Paris, back in 1855. It was not until 50 years later, however, that Desiderio Pavoni and Luigi Bezzara introduced

There is sugar in your coffee and there is SUGAR to your Coffee

i visited Godshot in Berlin today and this is one of the wonderful things i found there…

one of their sugars -

Coffeehouse Architecture / Café Zeman, Czech Republic

Café Zeman

A View from the inside Today here

• First Building in 1925

• New building (reproduced) 1995

Three chambers for coffee taste and (their) dwell time

The soil, air and water in the larger Equator areas, where many plants of the world feel best and at home, provide the quality and taste which give raw coffee beans their high value – for the palate and for the market. For the coffee taste in your cup it is quite relevant whether a coffee plant carried its berries at a height of 800, 1800 or 2800 meters, whether it became lots of sun or lots of shade. Nothing is unimportant. And these plants do not only enjoy the sun, the shades and the dance of their neighboring folks with respective cultures, they flourish with much more energy and finery when they are surrounded by many other plants and trees. Through a rich variety of flora and vegetation – the native biodiversity of nature – mutual protection takes place. And these are communities built by indeed respectable members – Coffee, Cocoa, Bananas, as well as orchids with their vanilla capsules and their needed busy hummingbirds. Not very far from such communities you will find tea, corn, olive trees.

What a paradise!

But besides so much poetry a highly relevant part of coffee taste develops somewhere else. Around 1960 in the small German town of Emmerich on the skirts of the Rhine, a couple of people thought to themselves, it would be a good idea to sell roasted coffee instead of raw. Until then it was usual buy raw beans and roast them at home. With this idea came the beginning of the roasting drums known today as Probat. It is firstly in a pan or in such a drum that coffee beans become the taste we love them for and develop over 1000 “flavour compounds”.

A hundred years earlier – around 1855 – the espresso idea had begun to take shape in France, but not until Desiderio Pavoni developed a patent in his workshop before selling it to Luigi Bezzera, did the industrial age of the espresso machines began and the wonder of a little chamber had begun, leading to our portafilter of today. One of the most important revolutions in the coffee ages takes place in this chamber – the espresso, almost the essence of coffee. It is in this small chamber that coffee and water get unified so well, that coffee becomes a fluid, without being too wet – the drinkable oil, which many call black gold.

‘Dwell time’ has become a common term among Baristi and extreme coffee lovers. This signifies the limited birth period of an ‘espresso’. But the term is also significant as the limited amount of minutes during the roasting process and the few seconds of a sip in the mouth. This dwelling, which I consider highly important and continue to mention again and again, is hence not only a philosophically existential approach, not merely a personal passion, but one which gets practical support.

It  sounds almost like a creationist phenomena. No wonder… one dwells upon a minimal amount of whiskey, just as we dwell upon a small glass of red wine, while I have never heard of ordering an espresso-to-go.