About Expresso

Espresso is a unique method of brewing in which hot water is forced under pressure through tightly packed coffee, one or two servings at a time. It is a roast of coffee, darker brown than the traditional American roast but not extremely dark.
The espresso system was developed in and for cafés. Despite advances in inexpensive home espresso systems, it is still difficult to duplicate the finest café espresso or cappuccino in your kitchen or dining room without spending several hundred dollars on equipment.

Fundamentally, they make coffee as any other brewer does: by steeping ground coffee in hot water. The difference is the pressure applied to the hot water. In normal drip brewing processes, the water seeps by gravity down through ground coffee, loosely spooned into a filter. In the espresso process, the water is forced under pressure through very finely ground coffee packed tightly over the filter.

Technical Definition of Espresso:

Espresso is coffee brewed from beans roasted medium to dark brown, with the brewing accomplished by hot water forced through a bed of finely-ground, densely-compacted coffee at a pressure of approximately nine atmospheres. The resulting heavy-bodied, aromatic, bittersweet beverage is often combined with milk that has been heated and aerated by having steam run through it until the milk is hot and covered by a head of froth.

Cultural Definition of Espresso:

Defining espresso culturally and historically is more problematic. The taste for a dark, heavy, intense coffee, sweetened and drunk out of little cups, is obviously much older than the espresso machine itself, and may stretch back as far as the first coffeehouses in Cairo, Egypt, established during the early fifteenth century. Technology is obviously an important element of espresso culture. Although all coffee-making lends itself to technological tinkering, no other coffee culture has applied technology to coffee-making with quite the passion as the Italians have to espresso. The word espresso itself suggests custom-brewing, as in brewed expressly for you, as well as direct, rapid, non-stop, as in express train.

So culturally and historically we have a paradox. On the one hand, espresso as a general taste in coffee-drinking goes back to the very beginnings of coffee as a public beverage. On the other, Italian espresso culture has refined that taste through a technology that flaunts its modernity.