You don’t want to use water that’s been distilled or that uses reverse osmosis. Edmonton tap water is fantastic except it’s a little hard [because of the presence of alkali substances and minerals] and we fluoridate it. But if you have a water filter, it works great.
When you’re making espresso, your goal is again to have a uniform extraction. The best way to do this is to take the coffee that’s in your basket and spread it evenly so it’s not going to fracture or break apart when the high pressure comes into contact with it.
Coffee beans are actually the seeds from a type of cherry. There are different ways to remove the seeds. Sometimes they use these recently invented machines that have spinning blades – as the coffee gets pushed out, all the fruit is stripped off. You can also leave the cherry out in the sun until the fruit starts to rot, and then run it through mills to remove everything. Or you can use crude de-pulping devices that strip off some of the fruit and then you soak off the rest.
Quite often, coffee beans are graded by density or size – so when they’re still green they’ll put them on these slanted, shaky tables, and the heavier beans will sort of fall down through channels at the end of the table that drop the heavy stuff. The heavier seeds are better because the density is a sign of slow cherry maturation, creating a high build-up of sugars and organic acids.
Coffee is grown on incredibly steep land and picked by hand by people who bust their backs to do it. It’s easy to just want to get it over with in one shot, but they have to do it over a week or two because the cherries ripen at different times.
