I’ve ordered the very coffee that sent me on this endless quest. I need this coffee to fulfill the mission and I need it now. For those who don’t know, “now” in French can be translated loosely by “whenever the fuck it arranges me”, at least the website where I ordered interprets it this way. So here I am, out of substance to feed to my ever-hungry machine.

Speciality Coffee

I walk into the speciality coffee shop like a kid into a toy store. A gigantic coffee roasting machine dominates the room. It’s beautiful. A wonderful scent of chocolate and coffee is in the air. Jackpot.

I’m greeted by a very friendly and knowledgeable gentleman. He speaks about his coffee like an artist speaks about his art. Unfortunately I have to tell him that I’m looking for Italian gas station coffee. Not my easiest pitch.

He makes me a coffee, probably to change my mind. He must think that I’m not a lost cause after all. The shot is wonderfully balanced. But it’s a bit sour and frankly watery, like a tea.

I congratulate him on his product, admitting that it’s not what I’m looking for. He nods his head like a father forgiving his child that prefers MacDonalds over his hand-cooked meal. He gives me another roasters address, doesn’t even let me pay for my espresso. What a nice guy.

The Italian Mixture

The other roaster is another kind soul. His eyebrows reach quite some altitude during my explanation, but they come down in time to inform me that he has what I’m looking for. The roast is called “The italian mixture”. A blend of arabica and robusta beans, dark roast. I take it without further hesitation.

Robusta coffee feels like drinking pure lemon juice. It has some punch. My first tries are not the best coffee I’ve ever made. They resemble the Italian coffees I had, arguably the worse ones though. But they do have this chocolate note I was looking for.

The coffee runs quicker than the speciality coffee I had before. It produces a lot of very thick crema. The aftertaste is harsh. I think that’s the robusta part. And notably, it extracts way faster. I manage to get quite a good 18g / 36g shot in 18s. It gets even better when I shorten it to 32g in about 16s. Finally I feel like I’m getting somewhere optimizing my shots.

Salami

I want to try a thing I heard about: A salami shot. Despite the name there’s no meat involved, all vegan. The idea is to capture the different stages of one coffee extraction in different glasses to be able to explore their taste individually. The process is simple: If your shot takes 18s and you want three salami slices, you change the glass every 6s. You could also do it at every 12g of coffee, but that’s a bit hard to measure so I go for timed slices.

The first glass is nearly empty, because the coffee starts to flow only after 4s. But boy is it strong. It is very sour, but it also has a nice body.

The second glass develops this nice body into a quite pleasant, round espresso shot. It has the most crema of them all and is neither sour nor bitter.

The last glass contains a thinner coffee with less crema. The taste is a bit watery, with less body. But the aftertaste is clearly bitter. It has the most “robusta” taste too.

A very interesting experiment. I liked the first two shots quite well. The last one felt like it didn’t contribute to my desired taste though. In other words: I need shorter extraction. Let’s see where that gets me tomorrow.