Smokey Maverick

After being inspired by the critically acclaimed Dr. Rubino’s Mean Bean Machine series, as well as growing tired of bumming free homemade espresso at a friends place (lives on Neville St – Apartment building on stilts – just like in Die Hard), I’ve since set out on my own to create delicious homemade espresso. I’ll be exercising my American right to plagiarize a good thing, and just as Dr. Rubino detailed his first homemade Espresso attempt, document my first attempt.

I began by searching for an espresso machine that was simple, generated high pressure, but was not one of those lame ‘1 plastic pod = 1 easy shot of espresso!’ wasteful contraptions. After much research, I settled on a machine from Kalorik. Granted, all you do is turn a knob to generate the espresso, but at least I get to practice a few different filter methods, and perfect my packing technique.

After purchasing Crazy Mocha ground espresso beans, and with help from my assistant Liz, I was set to make my first espresso, as well as a mocha (why not go the whole 11 yards?). Now the bean and the fineness of the grind greatly impact the end resulting espresso. However, as a novice, I’ll save grinding my own beans for a later time, and just trust CM.

Time to start the a fore mentioned espresso ground packing. Apparently there is some type of skill to this, as some coffee shops require their baristas to practice applying 40 lbs of pressure when packing the grounds, and testing this by having them pack on a scale. As for my experiment, I ended up putting entirely to much grounds in my filter, but eventually got it all evened and packed tightly.

After popping the filter into the machine, and flipping the switch, sweet liquid gold poured out. I created lots of creamy foam (which is somewhat good), which is called crema. Perfect crema is dark brown-reddish in nature – and mine was a bit lighter than that. Also, my end result espresso looked a bit to dark to my novice eyes, but tasted just fine. This could have been due to the fact that I didn’t know when to stop the machine, and was too excited to see all the espresso flowing out.

After making the espresso, it was time to try my hand at frothing milk for the mocha. Pretty pleased with this machine, as it was just what I was looking for – everything was simple and pretty easy for a novice to figure out.

We first combined the espresso with (way too much) warmed chocolate syrup, followed by our freshly frothed milk. This made for a very decent looking mocha, but the taste of too much chocolate syrup unfortunately overpowered all of the other elements.

And that’s all she wrote. A decent first run – but room for much improvement. The espresso was very good, mocha not so much, and the pop tarts – they were just right.

Tags:   Copying Mike Rubino · Homemade Espresso2 Comments