A Coffee Guru and a Conversation about Making Espresso at Home

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Susan and I arrived at a lovely Airbnb apartment in the Lavapiés quarter of Madrid on a sunny October afternoon. We were in the city last autumn for the premier production of a series of my plays on themes of authenticity. 

“As soon as we unpack,” Susan says, “We have to shop for necessities.” 

“Coffee and wine,” I reply.

“Exactly.”

Guided by a natural wine and food app called Raisin, we found our way to a shop called Pastora on the Carrera de San Francisco in the La Latina quarter. Pastora is a treasure chest of natural wines and artisan comestibles. The crown of Pastora’s gems is its coffee, which the shop’s owner, Juan Camilo, imports from La Finca La Noria, his family’s coffee bean farm in the Andes Mountains of Columbia. Pastora is the wellspring for the La Noria Coffee Project (lanoriacoffeeproject.com), which Juan conceived of to deliver consumers with the complete traceability of the quality of their coffee from plant to cup. 

After Susan asked Juan for a bag of coffee for her French press, I asked him for coffee for my Moka espresso pot, a query which led to a conversation about making espresso at home.

The Truth about Making Espresso at Home

Gaetano Marangelli: What do you tell people who ask you how they can make quality espresso in their kitchen?

Juan Camilo: The short answer would be that, unless you spend quite a lot of money on gear, you can’t. Making espresso at home is always a big challenge, more so if you're aiming for a quality espresso — perfectly balanced, bright and sweet. Many factors such as grind size, ratio, pressure and temperature are key to evenly extracting a good espresso shot, and unfortunately this is only obtainable with an expensive espresso machine and an equally expensive espresso grinder. This is the only way around to getting results close to what you get in your favorite coffee shop. I know now there are a lot of domestic coffee machines that promise to make espresso by pushing a single button, but in my opinion the majority of domestic espresso machines just lack the consistency on pressure and temperature required to make a quality espresso.

GM: What do you tell people if they ask you how they can make quality espresso using their Moka pot?

JC: Here I would make a distinction, the Moka pot is a great coffee maker, but the brew of a Moka pot is not an espresso. As I said before, to make an espresso you need an espresso machine that uses around nine bars of pressure for making a very concentrated cup of coffee in under 30 seconds, hence the name espresso. Nevertheless, the Moka pot is definitely the closest you can get to espresso in terms of strength and concentration at home without an espresso machine. A cup of coffee made with the Moka pot is typically two to three times more concentrated than drip coffee and when used properly you can get a full-bodied, strong and concentrated cup of coffee that can be enjoyed black or as a base for milk drinks like cappuccino or flat white.

GM: How do you use a Moka pot properly to get a full-bodied, strong and concentrated cup of coffee?

JC: First things first, to make good coffee you need to buy freshly roasted, good quality beans, and if you buy it at a coffee shop where they can grind it specially for the Moka pot, even better. Every method works best with a specific grind size, so if you don't own a grinder, the best next thing is to buy the coffee where they can grind it specifically for the method that you use at home. The grind size for a Moka pot would be three on a scale from one to ten. That being said, there are three basic tips for making coffee in a Moka pot: 1) start with hot water, this way you’ll reduce the time the coffee is in contact with the hot metal before it starts brewing; 2) use medium to low heat and leave the lid open so you can see the coffee brewing slowly and forming a delicate layer of cream; and 3) once it starts making noise and big bubbles, close the lid and let it finish brewing off the burner. That's it, with this method you'll avoid a bitter taste and bring the best flavors out of the coffee.