Coffee – Why Are There Coffee Grounds at the Bottom of an Espresso?

coffeeespresso

While having coffee at a fancy café earlier, we noticed that the espresso aswell as the cappuccino had large amounts of coffee grounds still sitting at the floor of the cup.

While being annoyed by this (given that the coffee was rather expensive), I still wasn't quite sure if this was intentional or not. For example, i reckon this could be expected when having a turkish coffee.

Question: Is there a good reason to leave coffee grounds in an espresso on purpose, or is it just sloppy?

Best Answer

Two possibilities:

  1. It's just sloppy. They're dispensing directly from the espresso machine into the cup, and as a result the finest particles that should be poured off, with proper technique, ended up in the cup. Given that the main reason to dispense directly in the cup is that they're using a super-automatic (push-button) machine, I'd be pretty unhappy with that if I'd paid a lot for it.
  2. They're deliberately leaving the fine particles in the pour to "prove" that it's real espresso and not a Nespresso capsule. This seems misguided to me, but I can imagine someone doing it.
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