Dream Bean | Our Guide to Creating a Perfectly Balanced Espresso Recipe

Think back to a time you went down to a local store and purchased a coffee just to be bitterly disappointed with the taste. Would you go back and order one again? Probably not. Would you recommend it to your friends and family? No way!

We have called on our Coffee Specialists to combine years’ worth of coffee industry knowledge and put them in easy to read guides. Usually behind the machines training baristas and sharing their knowledge of crop to cup coffee education, today they are focusing on ways you can keep your customers satisfied with consistently delicious coffee. The way to do this? Creating a coffee recipe.

Why should we create a recipe you ask? It’s simple, we want to deliver the same great coffee experience every single time.

When creating a perfectly balanced espresso recipe, Coffee Specialist Glenn Bailey uses the following technique.

1. Firstly, I determine my dosage weight. Cup size usually help me decide this, as dosage weight becomes a way to determine strength. An espresso usually works well as 1-part coffee to 1.5 – 2.5 parts water, therefore dosage weight determines how much espresso you get in the cup.
2. Once dosage is determined, I then complete a base recipe. This is 1-part coffee to 2 parts water in 28 – 30 seconds. E.g. 20g in 40g out in 28 – 30 secs.
3. Taste, taste and taste. Is it balanced? Sweet and clean with little to no bitterness?
4. From here I want to find the cliff. The cliff is where the espresso falls away and taste bitter and dry.
5. If I haven’t found the cliff yet I can extract more out of the coffee. To do that I can either run more water through it, or I can give the water more contact time with the coffee.
6. Once I have found the cliff where it is bitter and dry, I need to extract less.
7. Taste, and look for balance.

Work with our coffee specialists to create a base recipe suitable for your café, and one that will highlight the flavours of your chosen bean.

Our coffee specialists are available to train your baristas on great techniques to maintain a high level of skill when recreating the chosen recipe. This will include utilising tools like tamps, scales and your chosen coffee machine itself.

Using scales to weigh the amount of coffee you use per cup can seem cumbersome in a busy café, but keeping track of the grams used is incredibly beneficial to your café.

By measuring your coffee grams, you can estimate your sales per kilo, keep track of stock and monitor for situations where wastage is high. This is all about maximising revenue per kilo.

Maintaining the same weight and following the same recipe also helps you and your team eliminate a large portion of the process if there is ever an issue with your coffee, and it could mean there is something wrong with the equipment.

Remember, we are here to support you and your staff to win. If you or your staff would like training at either our centres or your café after restrictions have lifted, you can contact us directly on melbourne@grinderscoffee.com.au