Espresso – What Is a Pressurized Filter and Should It Be Used for Espresso?

It IS the roast that is the difference. The only real difference in the beans is that some beans taste better at a higher roast than others, so they are more appropriate for espresso. Your Italian grocery coffee company may be using the espresso label for marketing purposes, but in general, espresso coffee beans can be the same beans that are used for "regular" coffee, but roasted to a French or Italian roast level, which is darker than City or Full City.

Since the advent of Starbucks, many roasts are much darker than they used to be. Dunkin' Donuts coffee, which is a Full City roast, used to be the norm, but now a French seems to be what you can buy.

I roast my own coffee and take it to just into the second crack which is, generally, a Full City roast...a point where the character of the coffee predominates rather than the flavor of the roast. There is more information about roasts at Sweet Marias where I buy my green beans, and reading through the site will give you way more of a coffee education than you probably ever wanted.

So, yes, you can use the coffee you have to make brewed coffee. It will probably be roastier than you would normally have, unless it is just a marketing ploy, in which case it will taste normal. Consider how long you have had this coffee; if it has been shelved for a while "normal" probably won't be all that great, since freshly roasted coffee is, generally, way better than old coffee. But as long as the oils aren't rancid, it is more likely just going to be bland.

There are a lot of good detailed answers on this page already, but I guess I could add my own $0.02 to the conversation and maybe a different angle to the answer..

I have been home roasting and brewing for about 2 years now and I think the #1 thing I've learned about pulling espresso shots is that it is all about consistency.

In order to effect consistency you have to control your variables, and the more variables you get control of, the better chance you have of maintaining consistency.

Over the past two years I have continuously refined my process by modifying the entire chain of coffee production, whether it meant ordering a new piece of hardware or changing how I did something.

For instance, I installed a PID on my Racilio Silvia in order to control brew temperature, I bought a naked portafilter to get better feedback on the quality of my shots, and bought a pressure gauge to make sure I was getting proper brew pressure at the group head, the list goes on and on.

So when I saw your question about "always using the same coffee" I interpreted it as just another one of those variables that you can get control of and that will effect the quality of the shots you pull.

In the beginning I stuck with the same coffee and roast to try to minimize the number of variables I was working with. Once I was more familiar with how each variable effected my shot and how I could manipulate them to get what I wanted, I began to experiment.

So I guess for me keeping the coffee the same boils down to removing some noise from the system to make it easier to manage...