It’s like an epidemic. I’ve tried like 4-5 cafes now and it’s all like drinking battery acid. Do they just not care? Or do you think they believe it’s meant to be like this? If that’s the case I feel bad for them.
It’s like an epidemic. I’ve tried like 4-5 cafes now and it’s all like drinking battery acid. Do they just not care? Or do you think they believe it’s meant to be like this? If that’s the case I feel bad for them.
If all the coffee shops in your area serve unbearably sour espresso, there might be 2 possibilities: either all of them suck and can’t properly extract a light roast, or you might be hypersensitive to acidity. Personally, I love acidity and I enjoy fruity, pleasantly acidic espresso as much as sweet, chocolatey shots, but I get that for a lot of people, “coffee” tastes burnt and bitter.
Coffee is naturally acidic. Very acidic. Acid compounds are also among the fastest to extract. The lighter the roast, the harder it is to extract most of the coffee, therefore light roasts tend to be more acidic than more heavily roasted beans. Light roasts are all the rage ATM because they respect the beans’ origin and characteristics and highlight rather than hide the specificity of high quality beans. The more you roast, the more you lose the original character of the beans and get burnt flavors (this is why most commercial coffee is heavily roasted, the more you burn it, the more you hide the flaws of you cheap, commodity shitty beans).
Espresso extraction follows a curve :
Since roast levels affect the ease of extraction, the same ratio on a light roast and a dark roast will be wildly different. a 2:1 ratio for a light roast would be still way under-extracted, therefore a longer ratio should be used to get some sweetness to compensate for sourness, and get a slightly acidic shot (2.5:1 to 3:1 ratio should be fine). Dark roasts will overextract much quicker and get bitter much sooner, and therefore should be shorter to be palatable. A medium roast should be in the Goldilocks zone at a 2:1 or slightly longer ratio.
TL;DR: ask for a longer shot or a medium roast if you want less acidity and more sweetness and chocolatey flavors, a traditional dark roast blend with up to 20% robusta if you enjoy old school bitter espresso, or drown it in dairy, sugar and spices.
This seems to totally bypass any acknowledgement that OP knows how to use his taste buds, and also his mind to compare those taste buds’ reports to previous moments in time.
OP’s not saying “espresso tastes acidic to me”.
OP is saying “espresso in a particular time and place tastes different than espresso in other times and places”, and I’m confident OP knows what such a thing looks like in terms of sensory data compiled over time.
It would be like if someone said “Wow they must have turned up the heat in here from last time I came here” and someone else responded “well maybe you don’t know how to interpret the sensation of heat”.
Just seems really dismissive, as if OP is a novice at having a nervous system or something.
You’re right and I sound like an asshole. Note that the first part of my statement is perfectly valid tho, I know only 2 places in my city where I’m confident I’ll truly enjoy an espresso there.
Also, sometimes stuff dawns on you at a later age. I found out in my early 30’s during a random sensory experiment that I’m oversensitive to sugar when I declared some sugary water disgustingly cloying and the nice lady told me that most people barely register the sugary taste.