"Nordic-Style" Roasts & a Desire for a Better Espresso

World-renowned coffee roaster, author, and product innovator Patrik Rolf once said something along the lines of Omni roasting represents (roasting for both espresso and filter brewing practices) laziness. He poked at roasters who are unwilling to roast differently for espresso and filter brewing practices as having an inferior approach.

Is he saying that espresso brewing practices make for a less-soluble coffee puck, compared to a filter brew ratio using a much higher water to coffee ratio while using the same lightly roasted “filter” coffee for both brewing methods?

We know that we can achieve the same extractions in espresso as we can in filter coffee with modern brewing practices and specific grinders with their burr geometries and internal/external grinder design. So, why would this still be a technique that many, if not most Scandinavian-style roasters are still pursuing for their espresso brewing practices?

I have extensive experience brewing a wide range of coffees and lighter roast profiles on espresso and have tested dozens of techniques attempting to understand the riddle of espresso brewing with light roast profiles intended for filter coffee. It should be said here that not only black espresso was tested over the years, but the importance of combining espresso + milk is perhaps most important here… We need coffee to taste great through milk, without folding its flavors or tasting “sour”. This is where people often opt for more solubility in espresso via a different roast profile. Can they not prep their puck, pump, water distribution, and grinders well enough for an even flow of solvent to travel through the coffee bed in order to extract high enough for both black espresso and milk? This answer may vary, but the better question here should be: If they can, then why do they prefer to roast differently for espresso?

This leads me to my argument:

Roasting differently for two different brewing mediums represents laziness in the recipe developer or an underlying avoidance (intentionally or not) of the necessary brewing practices in order to extract lightly roasted espresso more efficiently.

In my Omni Black & White espresso recipe listed on Pit Stop Coffee Co.’s brewing page, I talk in detail about the need for lower pump pressure and longer brew times being the key factor in making a very lightly roasted coffee taste incredible on its own or with milk. These factors, when done accordingly, allow the espresso to clearly represent its origin and/or processing characteristics via taste in the finished beverage.

Pulling espresso like this is easy because no matter how long the timing of the shot, even after a whopping 2 minutes, the shot can still be very tasty. But the biggest downfall of this brewing method is if the shot is pulled quicker than the desired time, it can taste completely sour in a milk-based beverage. For example: If I made the shot recipe for 12 seconds of low flow pre infusion combined with another 50 seconds of full bar pressure, but the shot pulled at the desired yield with 12 seconds of pre infusion and just 40 seconds of full bar pressure, then that shot may still taste great on its own, but I risk that shot tasting completely sour when even just a little bit of milk is added – a complete defective taste that basically anyone can notice.

For this reason alone, I believe either a lot of people have run into this issue and not tasted the shot pulled well, or they simply thought a 1+ minute shot should taste terrible, regardless of pump pressure.

It is true that a shot using 9 bars (or similar) of pump pressure would taste terrible with this shot time. You need to significantly reduce the bar pressure (most importantly: the flowrate) to be able to pull these long shot times, extract incredibly high via the prolonged brew time while significantly reducing channeling via keeping the coffee puck intact because of the “less-harmful” high pressure and flowrate (I’m making this post simple by correlating increase of flowrate with an increase of pump pressure to equal this issue of channeling, like any commercial café using high volume equipment will be used to hearing. I know others will want to break this down, but this is not the intention of this post.).

After dialing in a recipe for this brewing technique, it is incredibly easy to reproduce some of the tastiest black and white espresso-based drinks I’ve ever had. Even across all types of grinders ranging from EK43 with Titus Brew Burrs (but you must be able to build pressure, I think SSP’s new 98mm Brew Burr geometry allows for this) to Bentwood to Mythos, and more.

The Problem With Omni Roasts

I can brew light roasts using turbo shot techniques with around 10-12 seconds of low flow pre infusion and around 12-18 seconds of full bar pressure. Across all different types of bar pressures, my shots and milk-based drinks are very tasty, but they significantly lack flavor representation of their origin and/or processing method. My milk-based drinks taste like butter, or slightly like the coffee I’m using, but nothing like my Omni Black & White recipe produces.

This is where I think many people opt to roast their coffee differently in order to push out these flavor profiles. Even if they were not brewing with these turbo-shot styles recipes, their pump pressure may have been too high and/or their full bar pressure brew times may have been between 20-35 seconds and not have been able to extract high enough (most importantly: extract even enough without channeling) to produce a milk-based beverage that is as tasty as, if not more than, a more developed roast profile that solves a lot of these brewing and evenly extracted issues because of its increased allowance of solubility with the same parameters.

There Are a Million Different Ways to Brew

After brewing the same coffees using many different roast machines and many different roast developments (including some very long roast and development times), I’ve found that milk-based drinks using more developed, espresso-focused profiles gave way to other different tasting notes in milk that weren’t noticeable with other lighter roasting techniques. I’m able to brew this espresso using all of these techniques I previously mentioned, including the typical 20-30 second 8-9 bar techniques used in most shops. With all these different roasts and techniques, the espresso and the milk beverage tasted great and offered a really robust flavor profile through milk. Not of roastiness but of chocolate, pine, and other herbal/”boomer” notes often found in many espresso blends and high-fines producing grinders that dominated the cafe industry a few decades ago. Though luckily these roasts were much lighter than the typical American-Style coffee blend profile and didn’t have overwhelming defective flavors like smokiness, hollow, muted, etc. that are all too common in more developed coffees.

All-in-all I really enjoyed these espresso-focused roast profile coffees, but I felt like the origin flavors were being lost, or they changed and were simply subdued.

If I were pulling a 20-22g dose/40-60ml yield with 4-8oz of milk, ~8-10 TDS, and 24-26+% extractions, I would really opt to serve coffee that is a light filter roast and can showcase its origin and/or processing characteristics.

I believe roasting coffee with more development in order to accommodate for a coffee that can already be brewed with these high extractions and this TDS range is highly unnecessary unless you value “developed roasting” characteristics to dominate your cup, thus, significantly diminishing the importance of origin taste with high-quality specialty coffee.

The Main Downfall Is Time

With this recipe, you must allow a significant amount of time to brew each espresso. On our trailer, we’re able to brew hundreds of espressos in only a few hours on a 2-group machine while using our pre-infusion turbo shot techniques with a total brew time of around 24-29 seconds. Even with 3 portafilters, it would be incredibly difficult to brew our Omni Black & White recipe on a 2-group machine (we’ve done this for a year before we walked away from it). It’s because of this that I recommend a 3-group machine (only for a high-volume café) or to either brew (pre infusion) turbo shots for most of their espressos or roast more developed for their espressos. Then, you can brew the Omni Black & White recipe via another grinder with a much finer grind size for customers that order a smaller milk-based beverage without additional sugar or other ingredients.

But, in the end, in my opinion, if you’re roasting more developed for espresso or have a faster brewing system for “filter-roasted” (or even Omni-roasted) espresso, then you’re sacrificing the original coffees flavor profile for higher profits and quicker turnaround time.

We must decide what’s most important for our business, our clients, and the future of our industry. That’s a very tricky balance once you discover the benefits of this recipe. I wish you’d think about how to implement this for your café, your wholesale accounts, your training program, and your recipes for customers. Keep on educating. Keep on pushing the limits.

-Connor