As a former master roaster at a local coffee shop, I can attest to the importance of tamping the grounds. The link in Dinah's post is has great info about making a great shot. At the coffee shop, I used to make the trainees tamp their espresso on a scale until they got the feel for it.
When the espresso is properly ground and tamped, the shot should draw in a beautiful, crema colored "mouse tail" (in a fine, steady stream that kinda "twitches" slightly).
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.
Best Answer
Crema is a food foam. For crema to form and survive long enough for us to enjoy the espresso, something needs to hold the bubbles of the foam together. In most food foams proteins help hold up the bubbles, but in crema it is a mixture of proteins and oils. This makes it hard to predict what makes good crema. From practice, good crema comes from:
There are also tradeoffs between stability of the crema and the amount of crema produced. The two don't seem to go together. The crema also should have bubbles that pop and sprinkle the coffee aromatics into the air and our noses (like champagne). The higher pressure extraction helps extract and emulsify the oils (about 0.1g ends up in one shot). The darker roasts help with the Maillard reaction which creates the still unknown molecules that give crema its color and volume.