How to Make Espresso at Home: The Ultimate Guide

Your bladder empty? Can I continue now? Great!

Lies! All lies. “Espresso beans” aren’t, to put it plainly, a thing. There’s no roasting process that magically transforms them into espresso beans either — the espresso title gets slapped onto the demitasse thanks to the preparation process. In other words, it’s what you do to the beans that determines what fancy italian word it gets labeled with.

Any fresh bag of coffee beans can make you a top-notch espresso shot, as long as you have the appropriate equipment. There are, however, maker-recommended beans and roasts, and those are the ones you’ll (however erroneously) see labeled as “espresso beans.”

You can take the suggestion, if you’re just starting out. Know, though, that your favorite brand and roast of bean is likely to only be exemplified by the espresso process. Coffee is delicious, it’s my bread and butter, my meat and potatoes, the only way I get through my day, but some of its attraction is that I can sip on it for an hour.

Espresso is the essence of the 8 oz. cup in a hearty single ounce. It’s the total experience boiled down to a few heavenly minutes. A good pull is the total package, my friend, and getting that perfection in your very own kitchen is easier than you think.

I’m going to be completely honest: there are two ways to go about this from this point forward. You can read this in the order that I’m presenting it to you and really learn about espresso inside and out, really do this thing right, or you can skip to the bare-bones information and just get what you want right now without putting in the full effort.. Your call.

Anytime you learn something new, it’s sort of like diving headfirst into understanding a new language. I’m going to give you a leg up and give you a little dictionary right here, right now.

I can’t remember my last geography lesson. It was probably in high school sometime, if I even had one then. Are they supposed to do that in history now? I don’t have that answer, but what I do have the answer to is what countries you should be harvesting your coffee beans from.

I mean, not you personally, but some well-paid farmer overseas. I’m talking about the countries you need to keep your eyes peeled for while trolling the local grocery store or business aisles. Fresh beans always yield the best taste, so try a small, local shindig for some truly hot-off-the-press bags.

Now, here’s the thing about location: beans taste differently based upon the soil they’re grown in. Soil is, very obviously, different depending on which splotch of land it’s creating. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, espresso made from beans grown in different soils will taste differently.

It’s simple, really.

I’ll make it even simpler:

This simplifies the coffee bean industry a lot. Brands have different signatures, have secret roasting methods, and market themselves differently. We can all sit around and pretend that a cool, trendy voice and color palette doesn’t change the way we taste the product, but I think we’d all be lying.

Find a bag from the region that’s most pleasing to your tongue, in a roast that makes you happy, with a branding that makes you smile, and you’ll be set. 

To truly pull a shot with hundreds of years of wisdom behind you, you have to know what happened, how this beautiful machine before you came to be way back in the 19th century. I won’t go into the actual machines themselves right now, but you can check the low-down on the best espresso beauts here.

You’ll see a very similar breakdown of the history of the espresso machine, starting with Moriondo, an Italian man who had an idea, and Martina, the woman who executed it. Women know how to get things done; what can I say?

For all of Martina’s hard work on the initial prototypes of the espresso machine, though, which were products of the steam age, Moriondo jealously guarded them. He did nothing more than tweak bits here and there and, when he died, it gave others the opportunity to take a stab at the venture.

Bezzera made strides on these prototypes by adding brewheads and the portafilter. He even achieved temperature perfection — 195 degrees F. It was Desiderio Pavoni, though, who finally did the entire world a service and presented these machines to the public.

Pavoni added the first pressure valve, which is where our old-timey slang comes from — you had to pull the lever to express the water, now mostly referred to as “pulling a shot.”

If you want the more in-depth version of this story, the Smithsonian tells the full tale here.

What this ultimately comes down to is this: there’s a well-experimented-on science to making an espresso, and that’s what creates the perfect espresso shot. It’s a 25 oz. layer of ground (and tamped) coffee, 195 degrees F water, with 1.5 bars of pressure, resulting in 30ml of deliciousness. Those words come directly from Illy, the Italian coffee maker’s mouth, through several other sources, to me, and then directly to you, so you know they’re good.

If you thought that you would get away with just picking the right coffee and you’d be all hunky-dory, well... I mean, you’re not wrong. Picking the right coffee is half the battle, but there are plenty of other factors you need to take into consideration. Your environment needs to be ideal, so let’s make it happen.

The last thing you want is your shot tainted from something as silly as the water. Use a Brita filter to fill your machine’s tank or, even easier, opt for a machine with a built-in water filter. Just make sure you keep track of how often it needs to be changed. If your brew suddenly takes on a funky edge, the water filter is one of the first things you should scrutinize.

Next, you’ll want to spend a decent amount of time focusing on how you grind up your whole beans. If you cave and buy pre-ground, make sure that they’re fine, fine, fine, like Ryan Reynolds or Blake Lively. Or the two of them together. You catch my drift. To achieve this from whole beans, you’ll want a conical burr grinder.

Alright, let’s do this. We’ll go through this step by step, starting with the machine. 

It’s in your macchina’s hand now to deliver the smooth velvety espressa.

Like all good adventures and experiments, something’s bound to go amuck. Let’s talk about the variety of issues that beginner espresso pullers experience.

My, yes, that is a problem. It’s called over-extraction and that taste’ll stick around your mouth for some time. The most likely culprit is that you tamped a tiny too hard. Go grab the bathroom scale and focus on 30 pounds, 30 pounds and nothing else. If it so happens to not be that, you can try decreasing the water temperature, or you can shorten the brew time. 

You tried to cut corners. You thought the even distribution and tamping was silly. Here’s the moment where I get to say “I told you so!” Go get the tamper. Take a few seconds and really fill that portafilter correctly.

One, good job! You bought fresh coffee! In fact, the coffee you bought had so recently completed the roasting process that the oils haven’t had time to settle. Take that bag of coffee, seal it nice and tight, and wait a few days before attempt two. 

Pulling the perfect espresso shot is an art and, like all of the arts, it takes time to perfect. It won’t be long before you’re pulling them left and right, handing out saucers with demitasses perched on top, being showered with praise from your friends. Imagine it.

Now, go.

Buy an espresso machine and build your coffee arsenal. You’re a brew warrior and, today, you graduated.