Since the dawn of coffee, humanity has taken few breaks in its quest for a better cup. This month, Italian roaster illycaffe S.p.A is introducing a coffee machine for restaurants in the U.S.; it will be available in Hong Kong later this year. Called Hyper Espresso, it pairs a custom machine with a coffee-filled plastic capsule (both made by illy).
Since the dawn of coffee, humanity has taken few breaks in its quest for a better cup.
Our inaugural coffee buzz, according to legend, came after a shepherd in Africa noticed his goats grew frisky after eating the fruit of a certain bush. Early fanatics took theirs straight, chewing whole, raw beans. Then came roasting, grinding, steeping in water, and the skinny white-chocolate half-caf Venti.
The search continues. This month, Italian roaster Illycaffe S.p.A will introduce a coffee machine for restaurants in the U.S.; it will be available in Hong Kong later this year. Called Hyper Espresso, it pairs a custom machine with a coffee-filled plastic capsule (both made by Illy).
Like other single-serve systems, including Nestle's Nespresso and Kraft's Tassimo, it's meant to make it easier for groggy consumers or harried waiters to make a serviceable cup. But Illy's system tweaks the espresso recipe -- changing parameters like temperature and pressure that baristas and jittery espresso geeks long considered absolute.
It also moves Illy's coffee into eye-popping price territory. The company figures Hyper Espresso cartridges will cost home users about 75 cents a shot. That's the equivalent of $50 a pound of beans, compared with, say, $10.45 for a pound of Starbucks Italian Roast.
The goal is to position the company for a bigger slice of the market in coffee-filled capsules and cartridges; Illy already makes espresso "pods" for a variety of machines. Though the single-serve segment is a small part of the $7.8 billion U.S. retail market in whole beans and ground coffee, it has grown about 65% a year since 2001, to $99 million last year, according to Datamonitor/National Coffee Association of U.S.A.
For science nerds or anyone who's tried even briefly to impersonate a Roman barista, the new system represents some noteworthy physics. Illy hasn't exactly split the atom, but the company that more or less taught the world how to make espresso is now rewriting the rules.
"Illy was doing espresso education before anyone else," says Bruce Milletto, president of the American Barista & Coffee School in Oregon. "There's only one way to prepare espresso -- it's chemistry and physics."
Over the decades, Illy's researchers say they have isolated no fewer than 114 factors, from coffee growing to brewing, that must be controlled to make one good shot. Fresh beans must be ground and tamped just so, before exposing seven milliliters' worth of coffee grounds to about 30 milliliters of water at 90 degrees Celsius and nine bars of pressure for 30 seconds -- in a clean machine, per favore! Do so and you get a shot of rich, but not bitter, espresso, topped with a tiger-striped layer of coffee foam that Italians call crema. Bungle a step and it's, how do you say in English, swill.
Illy researchers have isolated and analyzed more than 1,000 volatile compounds that lend espresso its smells, says Illycaffe chairman Andrea Illy, the company's third-generation head and a chemist by training. Good aromas tend toward chocolate, almonds and peaches. There's also linalool, a jasmine-like scent that Mr. Illy calls "the ultimate flowery aroma."
A few years back, the researchers also identified a crisis that coffee drinkers never knew they had. With traditional brewing, water is forced through a bed of packed coffee grounds. But having dissected spent espresso pucks, the scientists realized that water doesn't percolate evenly through the grounds. Instead, it courses through some grounds while leaving others practically dry.
To Illy's ground control team, this was the problem. Not every piece of bean was yielding up its peaches and linalool. Other parts of the coffee grounds were being flooded, thinning the espresso's taste. So some 15 researchers and engineers undertook what became a four-year espresso reinvention.
The system they came up with works like this: Hot water goes into a coffee-packed capsule. Instead of merely dripping out the bottom and missing grounds along the way, the water stays put. Pressure builds. All of the grounds are infused.
Once the pressure inside the Hyper Espresso capsule hits a certain level, a small valve inside it opens. Then the coffee spurts out into a second chamber where it bounces against a plastic wall and aerates, creating lots of crema. (For aficionados, a thick crema marks a good cup.)
In scientific terms, the process is no longer percolation, but extraction. And because high pressure, not hot water, is doing much of the work, Illy has found it can lower the brewing temperatures of its machines by about 15 degrees Celsius, resulting in what it says is a better cup. As for the cost, says Mr. Illy, it's still cheaper than buying a coffee in a cafe.