Living The Ristretto Life

I was captured by coffee in 1975 while sitting in a former funeral home. It was Fall in Seattle, my date (I was hopeful then) and I had just been to a Pops Concert by The Seattle Symphony, and we had at my suggestion decamped to Cafe Allegro. Allegro was the first of the "second wave" of Seattle coffeehouses, and was in fact established in a fomer funeral home directly across the street from the western front of the University of Washington. (Cafe Allegro would eventually have much to do with Starbucks' conquering of the coffee world, but that is another digression.) The then new cafe had been advertising on my favorite FM station and I was as eager to go check it out as I was to impress my date with my suave urbanity. We pulled up on that rainy night to a comely brick building covered with that kind of vine maple that goes all crazy golden in the Fall and transforms whatever hovel it might cover into a Venerable Establishment.

"Oh, yeah, I come here all the time," I lied.

Little did I know.

That was the first night of my short, weird relationship with my date AND of my long weird relationship with all things coffee. The years to come would find me lurking in, working in, managing, and escaping coffeehouses. Ah, the formative years.........

Come to the point!

Early on in my training as a barista (he or she who brews and serves the espresso), I learned about caffeol and The Ristretto Life. (Well, not exactly in those terms at the time, but this is what years of reflection and a serious caffeine addiction will get you.) In Italy, one must apprentice for years before one is allowed to extract and serve espresso. As you might guess, here in America it is, sadly, more a matter of minutes.

But I had training from the best! I will never forget my first lesson:

One day at The Grand Illusion, we were told to dose and pack a portafilter for extracting a double shot of espresso. (In English, you take the thingie that holds the ground coffee in your left hand, put it under the grinder where the coffee comes out, and pull the lever twice with your right hand in order to measure out precisely 14 grams of ground espresso, tamp the coffee down with a blunt heavy object, insert the thingie into the espresso machine, and either push the button or pull the lever to start the pressurized heated water coming down through the coffee and into the demitasse.)

We were told to "pull" three successive double shots into three separate demitasses: the first for ten seconds, the second for twenty seconds, and the final one for thirty seconds. We then tasted each demitasse in order of extraction. This proved to be a classic demonstration of what happens when espresso is made.

We learned that the first component of coffee to be yielded is caffeine: a tasteless, odorless liquid that is responsible for the buzz, the addiction, and - depending upon whom you believe - inspiration, motivation, energy, and smiles......or a hopeless descent into hell's own maw.

The second component that coffee gives up is caffeol: that for which we are ostensibly all gathered here. Caffeol is the essence of coffee flavor, the gustatory manifestation of coffee's virtue, the sublime mellow syrup that says Sumatra! or Colombia! or Harrar! or Mocha! or the name of whatever hallowed land those particular beans hail from.

The final ten seconds is devoted to tannic acid, and a little goes a long way. You want SOME tannic acid in there for brightness and complementarity, but not enough to strip off the protective layer on your tongue. So the idea is to extract your espresso for the Goldilocks Time. You're gonna get the caffeine first anyhow, so never mind about that. The magic comes between the final two stages of coffee's gifts: when the caffeol is all in there but the tannic acid is just saying hello. Because the fact is that while caffeol is soulful, nuanced, creamy, and rich - tannic acid possesses all the subtlety of brass knuckles. Two seconds too long, and tannic acid OWNS the party.

Yes, this is about BALANCE! This is about Cafe Ristretto as a model for happiness and achievement of all we yearn for.

All of the Italian I have learned, I have learned at an espresso machine. Buon Giorno! Arrivederci! Ciao! Il Giornale! Doppio! Trippio! Quadruppio! (Double, triple, and quadruple shots, respectively) Al volo (to go)! Senza schiuma (no foam)! And yes.............RISTRETTO!

Ristretto means "restrained." For the purposes of Coffee as Life, it means that in extracting our espresso, we aim for that Goldilocks Moment: not too short, or we forsake precious droplets of the ephemeral flavor delight that is caffeol. Not too long, either, or we end up with nasty, rasty, bitter dregs of what might have been..........and a sour stomach to boot.

Now, here in the aforementioned America, I don't recommend ordering a Cafe Ristretto. The three-minute baristi one encounters in this barren land will offer you looks both blank and irritated. Unless this makes your day, and unless you revel in the casting of pearls before swine, I say let's just keep this our little secret. Let's appreciate this as a Life Lesson and save our suave urbanity for Italy, where they invented it. We can live The Ristretto Life without uttering a word.

So, my friends, here's to The Ristretto Life. Here's to Goldilocks, and the bed and chair and the porridge and the coffee, all of which are Just Right.

Ciao!