The origins of up dosing are closely tied to a cafe’s pursuit of profit. If you want to increase the average customer spend one way is to offer larger portions (of anything) as the most incremental cost of the additional ingredients is nominal and there is no increase in the primary cost element, which is the labour.
This approach works particularly well with coffee. The incremental cost of the milk (as it almost always is milky drinks in a cafes outside the small number of countries that have coastlines touching the Mediterranean) for a grande/supersize me coffee is nominal, as is the coffee cost, and the labour cost is no greater as it takes the same length of time to prepare as a small drink.
The trouble is as you move beyond a 200mL cup of say cappuccino, a traditional italian dosing of 7-8g per shot becomes drowned in an ocean of milk. It very quickly degrades to a coffee flavoured milkshake, and indeed this suits many cafes just fine as you can use any old coffee from a bucket roaster, and everyone’s happy.
As the so called ‘third wave’ coffee blossomed in North America with roasters and high end cafes wanting their customers to taste the efforts of their labours that had gone into the bean selection, roasting, and preparation the only way to achieve this in a land where large portion sizes are very much de rigour, was to increase the dose. As a result you now have many machines designed to drive water through monster triple dose baskets, easily holding 22 or 23 grams of coffee.
And that’s a perfectly understandable response to the problem; if you must drink a bucket of hot milk every time you go need a cafe then you need to find a way to get more coffee into the bucket. No issue there.
Where it becomes an issue for us is when the disciples of the third wave begin to sniff, oh, you only dose with 7/8g (single) or 14/16g (double) for espresso. Well our response is yes, and as a result we use a finer grind and enjoy hardly any issues with channeling which you seem to spend an awful lot of time fighting. Secondly we make our espresso to the traditional 30mL (single) 60mL (double) measures and therefore the lower dose is more than sufficient. Finally, we don’t like our espresso to taste like a cup of lemon/lime/other freshly squeezed citrus fruit, which up dosing tends to accentuate as you grind more coarsely to compensate for the larger dose and you then run higher temperatures to damp down the acidity.
We like our espresso to be complex, smooth, refined, sweet, and with an elegance that caresses our taste buds rather than yells at them. The bottom-line? Up dosing was developed as a response to gluttony. Whether you think the gluttony is driven from the supply side or the demand side is a moot point, but not necessary to determine here. When you are back to the pure pursuit of elegant espresso up dosing is as inappropriate as a rhinoceros at a performance of Swan Lake.
There’s no shame in the old ways. Consider the possibility that our fathers, grandfathers, and great grandfathers may have known a thing or two; a lot was achieved before we were born.
Don’t confuse the message here as one of being a slave to all things Italian. We would be among the first to acknowledge that in many cafes in Italy the coffee has become commoditised and it is flat, stale and lacking in complexity as a result. But it is annoying to read the thinly veiled inferences that there is nothing that Italy can teach the latest generation of baristas about coffee.
There is a deep rich lore of coffee in Italy with the opportunity to learn so much from so many people practising their craft in so many different parts of Italy. Indeed it seems that Italy is entering something of a renaissance in espresso; there is a growing awareness that they may have been surpassed in some aspects of coffee that that previously ruled without question and there is a growing motivation to win the mantle back.
So many Italians in particular, and Europeans in general, have taught us so much about coffee that we are very happy to sit back, listen, and learn. We don’t think we’ll be implying they’ve got it all wrong any time soon.