The Espresso Revolution Over the past few months, almost everything we know about espresso brewing has been called into question. Today, I will share with you the story of espresso, the meaning of SOUP, and the radical implications of GRINDING COARSER. ------------------------------ Espresso is traditionally prepared with finely ground coffee brewed under pressure using an espresso machine. It is almost impossible to make well. You need, at minimum, hundreds of dollars of expensive coffee equipment, dozens of hours of practice, and great coffee beans. But it is so finicky that each day - and often throughout the day - one must adjust several parameters to maintain a consistent flavor profile. To be honest, I have had very few good espressos in my life – they are almost always defective. On his blog, @jimseven famously posited the question to cafe operators, "what percent of the time you order an espresso at your own cafe do you expect it to taste good?" The answers are abysmally low. So how did we get here? The Single Shot Traditional Italian espresso followed a simple formula: seven grams of coffee, finely ground, extracted at nine bars of pressure for twenty-five seconds, yielding about twenty milliliters of concentrated beverage. The ~1:2 ratio became gospel, codified by Andrea Illy in the 1990s as the definitive standard. This was espresso as most of the world knew it—dark roasts, consistent technique, that distinctive golden stream pouring from the portafilter like honey, crowned with that layer of reddish-brown foam we call crema. The equipment was straightforward: a pump-driven machine applying constant pressure, a good burr grinder set fine, and muscle memory developed through thousands of pulls. This was espresso. This was the foundation. The God Shot In the 2000s, web forums like Home-Barista.com and Coffeed brought nerds from around the world together to experiment with coffee. And experiment they did. Using digital scales (imagine weighing your coffee!), freshly ground coffee (not from a dosing container!), and "bottomless" portafilters, home enthusiasts staked a claim in a new way of making espresso. Enthusiasts would pilgrimage David Schomer's legendary Espresso Vivace to taste the platonic ideal of coffee: "the God Shot." In one sense, the God Shot era was the wild west of coffee. Pioneered by "home baristas" without formal training, espresso recipes developed some weird quirks. John Weiss started using a hypodermic needle to de-clump grounds in his portafilter, in what became known as the Weiss Distribution Technique (WDT). David Ross started spraying coffee beans before grinding – we now call this the RDT. Recipes centered around 2:1 double-shot ratios in naked portafilters, with 18.5 grams in, 37 grams out in 28 seconds. The lucky few got their hands on the latest tech from VST: expensive new portafilter baskets and groundbreaking coffee refractometers. But the era was defined by a general sense of yearning for what one knew could be better. As Tim Wendelboe's dramatic style of light roasting became more popular, these "god shots" tasted worse and worse, and the old rules weren't working anymore. The specialty industry was too focused on the latest La Marzocco model to develop new recipes, and espresso stagnated in flavor. If you ordered espresso in a cafe in 2015, and you'd be lucky to taste something palatable. Something had to change. Allongé Scott Rao saw the problem clearly. In the late 2010s, working with John Buckman and the Decent Espresso machine, Rao debuted what he called "allongé"—a style of very long espresso designed specifically for lightly roasted coffee. The approach was counterintuitive: grind even finer than traditional espresso, use pressure profiling to manage flow, and push water through the puck at ratios of 1:3 or even 1:4. Pull fifty to sixty grams of liquid from twenty grams of coffee. The extraction times stretched past a minute. The results were remarkable. Rao achieved extraction yields that bordered on the impossible–24%, even up to 29% on some Kenyan coffees. The Decent Espresso machine made it possible through precise flow control and pressure profiling, but the technique demanded immaculate puck preparation. Any channeling, any uneven distribution, and the shot fell apart. Needle distribution tools became essential. Deep WDT wasn't optional. Allongé worked beautifully for certain coffees—those bright, high-altitude African lots in particular. The message was clear: more extraction was better. Push the boundaries. Pull more from the coffee. If you could hit 25%, why not try for 27%? The entire trajectory of modern espresso pointed in one direction: grinding finer, increasing yield, and pushing flavor further than we ever tasted. And then came the scientists. Turbo Shot In January 2020, a paper landed in the journal Matter that seemed to chart a new course. "Dr. Coffee" @chhendon published "Systematically Improving Espresso: Insights from Mathematical Modeling and Experiment," bringing mathematical rigor to what had been intuitive adjustments. The turbo shot approach was elegant: grind coarser, not finer. Use less coffee. Lower the pressure to six bars. Pull the shot fast–seven to fifteen seconds fast. The mathematical models showed that fine grinding created problems. Fine particles clogged the puck, causing channeling and uneven extraction. Some parts of the puck over-extracted while others under-extracted, producing muddy, inconsistent results. By grinding coarser and extracting quickly at lower pressure, turbo shots achieved higher average extraction yields with better consistency. They ran fast but tasted clean. The shots had clarity but less body, brightness without astringency. The paper was a triumph of systematic thinking, giving the community scientific backing for what some had discovered through experimentation. The science kept going. Famed coffee blogger Jonathan Gagné of Coffee Ad Astra continued characterizing espresso dynamics quantitatively, in what's culminated in this year's newly published The Physics of Espresso. Gagné synthesized the new understanding: modern baskets with different geometries fundamentally changed flow patterns. Needle distribution tools weren't fussy accessories—they were essential for even extraction. Paper filters could prevent fines migration. Grinders with cleaner particle distributions required different approaches than traditional espresso grinders. The community finally had the framework to understand why techniques worked. The trajectory seemed clear. Better understanding led to better technique. Higher extractions, more consistency, more sophisticated equipment. The future of espresso was professional, optimized, increasingly technical. And then SOUP happened. SOUP (Spro Only Un-Pressurized) This year, something emerged from the Espresso Aficionados Discord that shouldn't have worked. Coffee industry legend Bailey Manson noticed a weird new brewer from OXO – yes that OXO, the vegetable peeler company – called the OXO Rapid Brewer. This was a forty-dollar manual coffee maker designed for travel that looked like a clunky and awkward take on an Aeropress. The OXO wasn't even marketed as an espresso machine. It was barely taken seriously. But Bailey discovered something that broke every rule we'd just learned. By grinding coarse–somewhere between pour over and espresso–and using paper filters above and below the puck, the OXO could produce something intriguing. Some form of coffee came out of this strange device, between ~7-8% TDS with pretty respectable extraction yields ranging from 19-20%. The strangest phenomenon was that the OXO had very little pressure; its integrated pump release valve kept the brew chamber well below one bar. Lance Hedrick picked one up, tried a few brews, and loved it. He coined the term "SOUP" to describe these unique shots: Spro Only Un-Pressurized. And in just weeks, the OXO spread like wildfire. The first time I tried SOUP I was genuinely blown away. In just 15 seconds, with a $40 plastic brewer, I produced one of the most memorable coffees of my life. Hydrangea's Letty Bermudez Geisha tasted more floral, with better balance and body. Because of the low pressure, the coffee had zero astringency. The lower lead to unbelievable clarity. All of this added up into some of the most complex coffee I've ever tasted. This shouldn't have been possible. This random coffee was better than the high-extraction allongés, better than perfectly dialed turbo shots, better than traditional espresso pulled on five-thousand-dollar machines. And without any fancy equipment, I got it right on the very first time. The Great Unknown SOUP isn't a continuation of recent espresso trends. It's the opposite of everything we'd been learning. Allongé told us to grind finer and extract higher—SOUP grinds coarse and extracts lower. Turbo shots used mathematical models to optimize consistency—SOUP achieves consistency through a method so forgiving it borders on crude. The entire trajectory of modern espresso pointed toward higher extraction yields, and here was SOUP, stopping at 19-20% and tasting better than shots extracted to 25%. It would have been crazy to tell someone in 2020 that the best-tasting espresso would come from extraction yields under 20%. That contradicted everything. Rao's allongés demonstrated that light roasts needed high extraction. Hendon's paper showed that proper technique could push yields higher while maintaining clarity. Gagné's work gave us the tools to understand and optimize every variable. And yet SOUP–made with a travel brewer, coarse grinds, barely any pressure, and moderate extraction–tastes better. What do we actually know about brewing coffee? The most unsettling thing about SOUP isn't that it works. It's that we don't fully understand why it works. The conventional wisdom said you needed pressure to extract espresso-level intensity. SOUP uses essentially none. The science said higher extraction yields produced better flavor from light roasts. SOUP stops well short and tastes cleaner, sweeter, brighter. The equipment manufacturers told us we needed precise temperature control, flow profiling, pressure ramping. SOUP uses a manual plunger and boiling water. Everything we learned over the past five years–the sophisticated equipment, the mathematical models, the optimization of every variable–feels suddenly questionable. Not wrong, exactly. Just... incomplete. Like we'd been building an increasingly complex edifice on a foundation we didn't fully understand. The SOUP technique itself is almost absurdly simple: 1. Grind 22 grams of coffee about Aeropress fine. 2. Add paper filters above and below the puck to prevent fines migration. 3. Add 82 grams of boiling water. 4. Put on the lid and pump. And that's it. In about 10-15 seconds, you get a pale brown liquid with no crema–a haunted ghost of espresso that looks like one of the worst Americanos you've seen–at about a 7-8% TDS. It's so forgiving that people are getting great results on their first try. No dialing in. No channeling issues. No need for a $3,000 grinder or a $5,000 espresso machine. The barrier to entry is forty dollars and a willingness to question everything you thought you knew. What Now? SOUP poses some fundamental questions to the specialty coffee world. How deep of a local optimum are we in? How much better can coffee taste? And what are the actual primitives of extraction that contribute to flavor? The second order effects are dramatic. Coffee brewed at 19% EYs will have to cost more than those at 23%. As of this writing, there are ~no commercial espresso machines that can reliably produce SOUP, so why would you go out to buy a coffee worse than the one you can make at home faster? If you only need to spend $40 on coffee equipment, what happens to the accessories market? I know of no comparable enthusiast community where something radically cheaper turned out to be radically better. HiFi audio, camera gear, music equipment, kitchen knives... all these rabbit holes get more expensive. What if the last stop becomes the cheapest? In the last 20 years, there was a sense of linear progress. Golden Honey. The God Shot. Allongés. Turbo Shots. But now a technique that violates almost every principle we've established is producing some of the best coffee anyone's tasted. That sometimes the only way forward is to question everything we think we know and start over. Grind coarser. Build less pressure. Accept that the numbers might lie and your taste buds might be right. The future of espresso is uncertain. And that's exactly what makes it exciting.