Throw Everything out the Window

Why we should all feel empowered to break the coffee "rules" that have been ground into us.

In 2011, I worked at a small coffee shop in Brooklyn. I had just moved jobs—switching from a busy, chain-like shop in Times Square to a quiet, laidback coffee bar where I thought I was going to take coffee really seriously. (Feel free to roll your eyes as you read those italicized words.)

I remember being enthralled by the attention to detail baristas gave every drink, that I got to work with coffee from a prominent roaster, that customers wanted to talk about coffee with me. I had been hired to co-manage the space with the shop’s existing manager, and after they left, I was in charge. My first order of business: Upgrade our shop grinder.

At the time, we had a Swift grinder, a machine made by La Marzocco. If you’ve been to any specialty coffee shops, you’ve probably seen a La Marzocco machine, and if you’re old enough to remember, LM became synonymous with espresso machines when Starbucks outfitted all its locations with Linea model machines in 1989.

Immediately, I was turned off by by the grinder. Usually, when you grind coffee for espresso, the grinder simply dispenses grounds, and it’s up to the barista to dose and tamp the coffee. But the Swift grinder dosed and tamped for you, and I thought it was the worst fucking thing, an insult to the craft of making coffee. I really believed that a machine that automated a process so fundamental as tamping espresso would take away from the overall coffee-drinking experience.

Now, over 10 years later, I’d kill to have a machine that dosed and tamped coffee for me. In the last few years, many companies have worked strategically to improve the dosing capabilities of their grinders, and others have made machines that’ll tamp coffee for you, like the PUQpress, which promises, “Better extraction, easy workflow, no more sore arms after a busy day.” Baristas pull hundreds of shots of espresso a day, which can lead to repetitive stress injuries, including “barista wrist,” an injury similar to carpal tunnel.

Simply put: The machines do a better job than I ever will ensuring consistency while protecting my body.

But 10 years ago, you couldn’t have convinced me that automating the process of dosing and tamping would yield a comparable, let alone better, cup of coffee than the one I could make by hand.

This week, I published a podcast conversation with Niki Tolch, founder of Not Caffeinated Enough, an Instagram, YouTube, and video podcast series where Niki invites people of color to have conversations about coffee. With her guests, Niki talks a lot about the fundamentals of coffee, breaking down big ideas in a way where inquisitiveness is encouraged and “I don’t know” is always a perfectly acceptable answer. That open, welcoming stance feels like a big departure from the attitudes she was up against within coffee shops.

One thing I was struck by, in all the coffee shops that I worked at, and then just when I meet new coffee folks, often I get the sense of, “There is only one right way to do things,” or “I’m a huge believer in doing it this way. And I think the other ways are evil.” And that’s what I was seeing in all the videos I was looking up. “This is the best way to do this thing.”

And then in the new coffee folks that I meet, if they have some sense that I have experience in coffee, it seems like there’s always this assumption that I myself have really strong opinions on like, what exactly a cappuccino is for instance, or the right way to make it. And my thought is, “No, there’s clearly a lot of ways to do things.”

Coffee as an industry has been driven by these doctrines, by the assumption that there’s “one right way” to do everything. Part of this comes from, I think, coffee’s newness (although we’ve been drinking coffee for centuries, espresso machines weren’t invented until the late 1800s, and the earliest documentation of the word “barista” seems to be around 1916). We’re still putzing around, trying to find the best way to do something—so when something sticks, it feels like gospel.

One of the enduring principles that we stick to like it’s the law is that coffee begins to lose freshness from the moment it’s ground. We’ve talked a lot about freshness on the show, but in general, I bet most of you reading this have been told some version of, “You should always grind your coffee right before you brew.” Perhaps you were even given a disapproving look by a barista as you bought a bag of coffee and requested they grind it for you.

The idea that coffee is best enjoyed freshly ground seems like a hard and fast rule, but there’s more to consider. For example, what if you ground your coffee … 10 minutes before brewing? Or an hour? Is there an irrevocable threshold a coffee crosses as it travels along the fresh/not fresh spectrum? Is there even such a spectrum?

For me, this idea of freshness was challenged when I read about G&B Coffee, a coffee shop that opened in Los Angeles’ Grand Central Market in 2015. When G&B, which was founded by two former U.S. Barista Champions, opened, it was met with tons of praise and recognition, mostly for the way it bucked tradition. Customers didn’t need to wait in a single-file line, for example. The wraparound bar was designed so guests could walk up to any point and be served by a barista, kind of like what you might do at a bar with a bartender.

G&B Coffee. You can see on the left the pillar reads, “order anywhere.”

G&B also looked for ways to speed up service, and honed in on dosing. Usually, when a drink is ordered, a barista grinds coffee and spends a few moments dosing, weighing their portafilters (those little metal things baristas pull off an espresso machine, literally portable filters), and then weighing the portafilter and coffee together to get the dose exactly right. (Grinders are really bad at dosing exact amounts of coffee—they’re getting better, but many still aren’t as accurate as you might need, especially since, as I’ve written, coffee is all about ratios.)

This process takes a lot of time, particularly fiddling with the dose. Instead, the team at G&B decided to do something different: They pre-ground and -dosed a batch of coffee. An article from La Marzocco explains:

A barista will grind the coffee, adjusting the dose as necessary, then will drop those grinds into one of the twelve shakers on the tray. When each of the shakers on the tray is filled — three across, four down, twelve in total — the barista will pick up the tray, turn around and place it next to the espresso machine. The barista working the machine needs only to grab a shaker and funnel it into a portafilter.

Now, whenever a customer orders, the barista can simply pick up a cup filled with the exact amount of coffee they need, tamp, and pull a shot. The process takes less than 45 seconds, and G&B noted no drop in quality by simply grinding a few doses of coffee before serving.

I both like and dislike this example. I like it because the freshness of coffee is understood in this really linear, myopic way, and the folks at G&B challenged that. But I dislike that it took a room full of baristas, including two champion baristas, to break down an idea with an ingenious, albeit not very complicated, solution.

Curiosity can be hard to cultivate, and, as Niki mentions, a lot of folks have been taught that there’s only one way to do anything in coffee. I’ll scream this again and again from all the rooftops: Coffee is one of the most accessible science experiments you can set up in your own home, and there’s a lot of room to question ideas about your favorite morning beverage that were presented to you as irrefutable gospel.

So here’s your permission, if you needed it. Go ahead. Throw everything you know out the window. Break the rules—and hopefully, you’ll learn something new.

I’m curious to know: What’s a rule about coffee you’ve been taught that you’re … not so sure about anymore? Tell me in the comments below, and I’ll try to figure out where the rule comes from and how to test it!