Slurp
Not being an espresso drinker myself — ever since moving to the Balkans in the last decade of the last century, I’ve been drinking Turkish (or Bosnian, or Serbian) coffee — I’ve always been a bit mystified by the cult surrounding the perfect espresso, and the derivative cult of the perfect espresso machine. Today’s Süddeutsche Zeitung does a good job shedding some light on the mattter.
It seems your typical aficionado is a guy (no surprise there), lives — if he’s German — in Bavaria or Baden-Württemberg (which together account for 41 percent of the espresso-maker market), has a nice income and is a bit weird. For example, there are websites that provide soundfiles of espresso machines. You read that right. Soundfiles — of the noise a machine makes as the water percolates through the coffee, or whatever the right term for that is. (The article doesn’t give any links.)
But one explanation I found very satisfying. Most of the time I get a funny taste in my mouth from espresso at restaurants around here (Switzerland, Germany, France). The article explains that the machines made by the market leaders in Germany — Jura, Saeco — are crap and consist of plastic parts inside, which means that the water pressure is simply not big enough. What you get is a “solution,” not an “emulsion,” and apparently that’s the whole difference — it’s not just my imagination, it’s actually chemical.
I’ll take my Turkish brew any time over any of these.
