What Andy is Excited About

Espresso machines brew at enormous pressure – about 13 atmospheres. That means the pressure in your espresso machine is 13 times the pressure of our current atmosphere. To give you a sense of just how much pressure we’re talking about, your car tires are at about 2.4 atmospheres.

Prior to the industrial revolution, it’s was never practical to mass-produce a machine with such high pressure, so the idea of espresso never really occurred to anybody. Once steam powered machines became more prevalent, however, people discovered that brewing coffee under such high pressure extracted more oils from the grounds.

Now coffee itself has been around for thousands of years. So, relative to the whole history of coffee itself, espresso is quite a recent innovation in coffee technology. That’s why I call it “Coffee’s Delicious Cyborg Cousin”.