Hi, this idea for a post came about after reading the other post asking people to describe their daily brew method.
I’ve been into coffee ever since I started chasing the ability to get decent coffee at home that’s strong enough so that most of the cup can be hot milk.
Cafetiere was always disappointing, the flavour always seemed to be a bit… “woody” if that makes sense? Almost like you’d expect ground coffee beans to taste like, and not the “actual extracted coffee flavour” that you’d expect.
I never bothered with any of the pourover methods because I couldn’t see how they were any good for “milk drinks”, they just seemed like different ways of making caferiere strength coffee but with more control over the brew.
I was never aware of aeropress really early on, and when I did hear about it it just looked like another way of making filter strength coffee so I steered clear of that.
Then I discovered the Moka pot which I used for years by cramming it with as much coffee as I could get into it which used to get pretty close to espresso strength but obviously not proper espresso.
Eventually we bought a Bambino Plus in lockdown and have been knocking out at least decent 2 lattes per day ever since (usually more if my wife is home)
The confusing thing for me has always been that the guys I have worked with over the years who have been really into their coffee have always used pourover or aeropress, and I’ve always been a little bit puzzled as to why they haven’t upgraded to an espresso machine yet (these people are all well paid and could definitely afford one if they wanted one, looking at the grinders they used to buy)
With all of this context in mind, what is the attraction to pourover or aeropress style coffee vs. espresso? E.g. espresso can = americano if it’s just a case of liking watered down coffee without a lot of milk, just add hot water. Please sell me on the idea of pourover or similar methods 🙂
It kinda sounds like your preferences (“strong enough so that most of the cup can be hot milk”) don’t align with the kind of results you’d get from a pour-over, so I admit I’m slightly confused as to why you want to be sold on the idea. It’s okay to prefer espresso-based drinks over pour-overs. You don’t have to be into both to enjoy coffee.
I’m a barista, so I’ll have espresso-based drinks at work and pour-over at home. I definitely enjoy both, if in slightly different ways, but I do have a preference for pour-over so I’ll at least try to answer your question of why a coffee-lover wouldn’t necessarily “upgrade” to an espresso machine. These are all just my opinions, and like I say to my clients, I’m not a coffee expert, I just work here.
Pour-over feels like it has a wider margin of error for dialing in new beans. Even if I don’t nail the pour-over for the first few cups of a new roast, I’ll probably have something that’s at least drinkable. Whereas with espresso, dialing in is a lot more finicky and IMO the results of a less-than-optimal shot are much more unpalatable than less-than-optimal pour-over. I like to switch up my beans at home very regularly, and don’t want to use up 3/4 of a bag dialing in before I get good coffee.
I find I can better taste the nuances of different beans in a pour-over versus espresso. That might just be because I’m more used to comparing pour-overs, but even working in a café and upping my espresso consumption significantly hasn’t overcome the distinct espresso-yness that I always taste regardless of the bean/roast.
I enjoy the ritual of it more than I enjoy making espresso. Not that espresso can’t be a ritual, but I love hearing my water boil, setting up my timer and scale, blooming, swirling my water. I love the level of control you get from cup to cup as well, it’s easier to adjust variables compared to espresso while still getting a drinkable cup, which encourages me to experiment a bit more freely.
I’m a cheap bitch, 10$ or so for a plastic V60 and some filters and you can already make some great coffee, the investment for espresso is a turn-off for sure.
Also, this is just a suggestion, but if you ever get the opportunity to taste an americano and a pour-over made from the same beans side-by-side, do it. You’d be surprised how different they are.
I definitely wanted to say a whole bunch of things before I scrolled down here, but it turns out you already said them all and you formatted it better than I would have too. So … yeah.
All I’d add is that espresso truly shines in its textural experience, it has a body and mouthfeel that no other extraction method can quite match. This is my favorite thing about it. Though it does have a distinctive flavor character, certainly, likely due to the suspended sediment. Paper filter removes all that.
Would be simple enough to test. Pull a shot, then pour it through a prepped filter paper, then taste it. Bet it just tastes like strong pourover.
Brewing under pressure definitely also makes a difference, although maybe not as big a one as folks think. Jkim has a pretty funny video about doing an immersion brew at 9 bar in a Flair.
Lot of folks also do espresso with a paper filter at the bottom of the portafilter, and they definitely still get espresso out. The micro fines are just blown straight through the filter by the pressure, I think. It probably does trap a little of the oils though? I dunno, I haven’t tried it.
Really interesting thanks. I’ve come to think of pressure on my Flair as not super important just for pressure’s sake. As long as you can hit at least 5-6 bars you’ll get espresso. I concentrate more on pressure as flow rate. Do I want to speed up certain parts of the extraction? Then up the pressure. So for example, the first seconds of an espresso pull might be fruity and more acidic, then gets sweeter and the final phase more bitter. A lot of factors influence this more than just time and every bean is different. But with the Flair, you could go slower (lower pressure) through the first phase and faster through the end if you like that profile.
Oooh if it’s a slow day at work tomorrow I might try to compare a filtered americano to a pour-over. Heck, might even make a normal americano as well and test all three.