The Crema and You

When I make an espresso with my espresso machine, I can tell it’s a good pour when it settles into my shot glass like a Guinness. Funny, how a stout beer and an espresso should be about how good the head looks on it.

When I was a barman in Australia many moons ago, learning to pour a perfect beer was the opposite. Anything more then 5mm of head on an Aussie beer was seriously frowned upon. The trick to reducing the head was to tilt the glass while pouring the beer so that it never hit the glass with any force. Keeping the head small on Aussie beers is a challenge because of the amount of CO2 gas in them. Allow too much gas to escape and you ruin the taste of the Aussie Lager or Bitter.

The thing with any beer though, is that its head is made up of gas which is a result of its brewing. The same is not true of an espresso. The head or crema, as it is called on an espresso, is an emulsion of vegetable oils, sugar, and proteins. This crema is where the true flavour of your coffee can be found. How thick the crema is on your espresso is determined by several factors:

1. How fine or course the coffee was ground.


2. How much oil the coffee has or how fresh it is.


3. How much pressure is used in the extraction.


4. How hard or light the coffee is packed into the brew head or portafilter.

Even if you get all of these things right there is still one important factor in getting the perfect espresso…you. You’ll need to practice over and over on your espresso machine. Barmen require training and so do Baristas. I don’t claim to be a barista myself, but by God if I can pour a beer an Aussie can drink, then I can sure as hell pour an espresso an Italian can admire!

‘First let a man teach himself, and then he will be taught by others.’ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections:’ Science’, 519.