Crema De La Crema – An Espresso Coffee Blog in Singapore

The number one highlight of Singapore National Barista Championships 2011, held in conjunction with Tea & Coffee World Cup Singapore (for me) has to be Oriole Coffee Roasters’ brand spanking new espresso machine, the La Marzocco Strada! This is the first Strada to appear in Asia, according to May Soo of Wineberry, the La Marzocco distributor in Singapore. This is the Strada EP (Electronic Paddle).

I really should be talking about SNBC and the performances, but this machine takes the cake. While other companies are starting to introduce PID’s and taking into account temperature stability to produce a better cup of espresso, La Marzocco (and Slayer) have taken the next step in the evolution of espresso making, the keywords being “PRESSURE PROFILING.” They have complicated the whole process towards making a cup of coffee. I say complicated, not in a bad way, but more like the Star Trek of espresso making, to go where no baristi have gone before – the sky’s the limit. Before pressure profiling, this was what the barista had to do to make a good cup of espresso:

Freshly roasted coffee that was properly rested and properly stored and freshly ground-on-demand and precisely dosed into a heated portafilter without clumping and then evenly distributed to provide a levelled surface for a thirty pound equally distributed pressured tamp and the portafilter locked into a grouphead that had temperature stability controlled by a PID and a machine that gave the double basket of espresso grounds a pre-infusion lasting 5 seconds of 3 bar pressured water before gradually heading into the 9 bar region lasting another 20 seconds and filling 2 heated demitasses below with an ounce of crema rich espresso each.

Enter Pressure Profiling and the barista’s (several) new routines will be:

Freshly roasted coffee that was properly rested and properly stored and freshly ground-on-demand and precisely dosed into a heated portafilter without clumping and then evenly distributed to provide a levelled surface for a thirty pound equally distributed pressured tamp and the portafilter locked into a grouphead that had temperature stability controlled by a PID and a machine that gave the double basket of espresso grounds an infusion lasting x seconds of y bar pressured water and repeating the infusion process another z times to make 2 demitasses of espresso of w volume but unknown quality where w, x and z are greater than zero and y is greater than zero but less than or equal to 12 bars.

Here is a diagram provided by La Marzocco to give you a vague idea of what to expect from the Strada:

The La Marzocco Pressure Profiling Cheat Sheet

Where do we go from here?

“Second star to the right, and straight on till morning.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011 at 11:10 am and is filed under barista, Cafe, championship, competition, News, Pulls, singapore. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.