Making coffee
Let me tell you about my espresso making ritual… (Trust me, this will be “on topic”.)
I
I make coffee every day.
It's a science.
Several times a day I prepare a latte. Freshly brewed espresso. Double-shot. Steamed, textured milk. The perfect combination.
I've started this practice when the pandemic lockdowns forced nearby coffee shops to close and I no longer had access to good coffee. This is why at this point…
…I have some experience:
3 lattes a day
21 a week
1092 per year
more than 3000 since COVID
It takes 10 minutes:
Hand-grind 17 grams of recently roasted beans to fine grounds of a size appropriate for espresso on grinder setting 23 (this is for the coffee beans I’m using currently; a different batch or roast may require a different setting).
Clean grinder to make sure all 17 grams make it into the shot. Then clean and dry the portafilter to prepare it for extraction.
Add ground coffee to the portafilter. Distribute the grounds evenly. Tamp it to compress the grounds into a puck that has consistent density throughout and prevents the water from finding channels of least resistance. You want the water to pass through all the coffee to extract all the good flavors.
Brew into a clean, pre-warmed cup. We're aiming for a 2:1 ratio. 17 grams of coffee in, 34 grams of espresso out. The extraction should take between 25-30 seconds. The result will be balanced: not to bitter (under-extracted), not too sour (over-extracted). As you adjust for a different batch of coffee beans, dial in the parameters until you get there.
Steam the milk. Use cold, full-fat cow milk. Fill the metal jug to the marked line. Clear the steam wand and bring it to temperature. Lower it into the milk, first pushing some air into the milk, then lower it more to evenly distribute the air bubbles for perfectly textured milk until container is too hot to hold. Bump container on table top to remove any large bubbles at the top.
Pour the textured milk into the espresso. Start by pouring from a few centimeters above the cup to mix the milk with the espresso without mixing it with the crema. When you only have 1/3 of milk left, lower your pouring height, get close to the crema, and use it as a canvas for your latte art. (This step is optional. It tastes good without it. I promise.)
Enjoy a perfect latte.
The analytic mind stops here.
Or maybe it goes here:
You achieve your perfect result with amazing consistency. Surely it must be possible to optimize this whole process in a way that you can build it into a machine, and just press a button, so that in the future that’s all you need to do, while still achieving the same result. Right?
Every step towards the goal is just an annoying necessity of manipulating substances in the right way consistently to get to a good product. Wouldn't it be great to automate all that away and just have a consistently perfect latte on the press of a button every single time?
After all, it’s all about the result, isn’t it?
II
I make coffee every day.
It's an art.
Several times a day I prepare a latte. It's a great reason to have a break from my work. I can distract myself from a challenging problem for a short while. It's a short escape to take my mind elsewhere. Like meditation.
I'm pretty good at it at this point:
I know the amount of beans and how much ground coffee needs to go into the portafilter.
I feel how much pressure I need to apply to tamp the grounds.
I see if the extraction is good by the color and flow.
I hear when the milk has the right texture.
Each step flows into the next. I don't think about any of this. I just do. I'm on autopilot. I'm not thinking about anything else either. I'm here, in the moment, making my coffee, and I enjoy it. The analytic mind is silenced — if just for a short while.
I achieve my perfect result with amazing consistency. Not every time. But more often than not. I don't mind that it takes ten minutes of my time. It's a ritual I cherish. I don't feel a need to optimize it, or to automate it. Why would I automate away something that I enjoy?
Every step towards the goal is part of the process. It's not that I don't care about the result. However, in a strange way I do not care about the result while I'm going through the process. I mean I don't think about what needs to happen, or what could go wrong, or how I can optimize parts of it. I don't think at all. I just do. I'm in the flow.
And deep down I know that because of that I will achieve a good result consistently. I trust in my capabilities and I have done this so many times that it makes sense. I know what I need to do. Every movement is choreographed, even though I never planned for it to be. And yet I cannot explain to you what exactly makes me know and feel and hear the subtle details that tell me if it's going to be good.
It’s all about the process. Or is it?
III
So, what is it then?
Art or science?
It's both.
I'm not here to argue for one side or the other. Those who are still stuck taking sides have not yet experienced how wonderful it can be if you get to combine both.
The science of making espresso pushes me further. As my experience grows, I become capable of focusing more on details. It gives me opportunities to try subtle adjustments and provides tools that enhance my senses to better see the consequences of these adjustments.
Is it the tools that make me better? I don't think so. At least not directly.
A scale lets me dial in the amount of coffee and how much espresso to extract out of it. But knowing that 17g of grounds should be extracted into 34g of espresso is not the secret to a perfect latte, but just a starting point for your experience to grow more effectively.
Dialing in extraction with a scale enhances your perception so that you can now see in precise measurements what you would otherwise only be able to feel. But it's not the precision that makes you better. It’s the experience you build with that added precision as you get to more clearly see the consequences of your subtle changes. The tools are like magnifying glasses to help you see the detail that you might have missed otherwise. But if you don't have the experience yet, the added precision just adds complexity.
I pulled 3000 espresso shots out of my machine without a scale. I just recently added one to my process. And I just recently learned about ratios. For a coffee nerd that is probably shocking. But in my experience adding the scale recently and finally measuring my input and output didn't feel like increasing complexity to me at all. It just made sense, because I already knew what I was doing. I already knew what I was truly looking at. And what I was truly looking at was not the precise amount of grams that I target, but how the amount of coffee and the time and amount of water that flows through it influences the result. Now I just had a magnification glass through which I could see the finer details of how I can improve further.
So in a way adding the scale made me better. But it wasn't just the act of adding a tool that caused that. It's more complicated. I was able to improve further because the tool helped me see more detail at a time when I was ready to process more detail.
Pulling espresso shots manually looks like an incredibly complex process to anyone who has never done it. Like pretty much anything else looks daunting if you have no idea how people pull that off. There just seems to be so much complexity.
As software engineers we often believe that the tools we provide help people dealing with that complexity. But often they just add more of it on top.
The best tools I know augment people's abilities by helping them to get better at what they already know how to do. They give them the magnifying glass to look at the details they want to look at to help them improve.
They don’t want to automate annoying tasks, they want to augment people to become even better at their craft.
They don’t want to make them more efficient, they want to make them better.
They don’t want to optimize their experience, they want to enhance it.
I wish I could see how this works as clearly for making software as I can see it for making coffee.
Mirror of the Self is a fortnightly newsletter series investigating the connection between creators and their creations, trying to understand the process of crafting beautiful objects, products, and art.
Using recent works of cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and design theorist Christopher Alexander, we embark on a journey to find out what enables us to create meaningful things that inspire awe and wonder in the people that know, use, and love them.
If you are new to this series, start here: 01 • A secular definition of sacredness.
Overview and synopsis of articles 01-13: Previously… — A Recap.
Overview and synopsis of articles 14-26: Previously… — recap #2.
Another great way to start is my recent presentation Finding Meaning in The Nature of Order.