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>Personally i think the best you can get at home (unless you can afford a pro machine) is aeropress. Dead serious Given the notoriously grainy mouth feel of ae

>Personally i think the best you can get at home (unless you can afford a pro machine) is aeropress. Dead serious Given the notoriously grainy mouth feel of aeropress coffee, and the sheer joy I've had out of proper espresso made with even less-expensive home machines (e.g. a Rancillo Silvia, to say nothing of nicer home machines like Rockets), I'm utterly stunned by the weirdness of this assertion. I wouldn't be more puzzled if you'd said the best you can do at home is a Mr Coffee. Dead serious.

quijoteuniv 4y ago
Interesting, can you describe what is for you a good espresso shot?
- ubermonkey 4y ago
  There's a certain sweetness that comes through with a well done shot, along with a real smoothness on the palette without sacrificing body. Certainly all coffee has a bit of bitter going on, but with a properly done shot -- under real pressure, with a dialed in set of variables (grind mass, desired shot mass, shot time, etc) -- it's just part of the party, not the whole thing. And you can absolutely get this at home, but you need a proper machine. (A Moka pot won't do it. People might LIKE Moka coffee -- lots do! -- but it's not the same thing.) I'd rather pull a shot from my Rocket than go to any shop in town. And, as I said, I've had shots just as good from machines much cheaper than my R58 (like the aforementioned Silvia). IME, genuinely good espresso is a fairly rare thing. The set of coffeeshops that pull consistently good shots is a much, much smaller subset of [Coffeeshops] than we might expect. What an aeropress produces is more akin to French press than anything else I've had. It's absolutely nothing like espresso. Since I'm not a French press fan, I end up not caring for it, but that's a preference thing, not an indictment of the method. When it comes to filter coffee (which is to say, non-espresso), I prefer Chemex.

quijoteuniv 4y ago

Interesting, can you describe what is for you a good espresso shot?

ubermonkey 4y ago
There's a certain sweetness that comes through with a well done shot, along with a real smoothness on the palette without sacrificing body. Certainly all coffee has a bit of bitter going on, but with a properly done shot -- under real pressure, with a dialed in set of variables (grind mass, desired shot mass, shot time, etc) -- it's just part of the party, not the whole thing. And you can absolutely get this at home, but you need a proper machine. (A Moka pot won't do it. People might LIKE Moka coffee -- lots do! -- but it's not the same thing.) I'd rather pull a shot from my Rocket than go to any shop in town. And, as I said, I've had shots just as good from machines much cheaper than my R58 (like the aforementioned Silvia). IME, genuinely good espresso is a fairly rare thing. The set of coffeeshops that pull consistently good shots is a much, much smaller subset of [Coffeeshops] than we might expect. What an aeropress produces is more akin to French press than anything else I've had. It's absolutely nothing like espresso. Since I'm not a French press fan, I end up not caring for it, but that's a preference thing, not an indictment of the method. When it comes to filter coffee (which is to say, non-espresso), I prefer Chemex.