Coffee myth busting

Burning coffee?

Alright this week will be a short one after last week’s marathon of a post and will be the start of a mini series of myth busting articles starting with:

Burning Americanos?

You may have either been told by a barista or seen online that your not supposed to pour boiling water onto the espresso to make an americano or else it’ll “burn the coffee”, this myth is completely false. Starting off, coffee beans are roasted at temperatures around 230 degrees Celsius so the brewing process with temperatures sub 100 degrees simply cannot burn or cook the beans further.

I don’t know where this myth came from as the taste will be near indistinguishable if you pour the shot first then the water or the other way around.

The truth about burnt flavours

Burnt flavours in coffee can occur, but only due to either the roast level of the beans or over extraction.

Very dark roasted coffees can often taste abit burn or smoky in flavour due to the roasting process as the beans have become actually burnt and are visibly incredibly dark in colour.

Over extraction is the main reason someone will taste a burnt flavour in coffee. Extraction is mainly affected by temperature, surface area and time and so when extracting espresso if your grind size is too fine then the water will have longer exposure to the ground coffee and such will extract more flavours, including the less desirable and harsher flavours found in coffee. the temperature of the water used in espresso machines is usually fixed but do bare in mind that the higher the temperature the more extraction occurs thus risking over extraction.

Well, hope that cleared some things up! I hope you’ve enjoyed this myth busting and have a great week with some even better coffees!