Can Italian coffee be made with other ingredients? Can espresso and osmanthus be extracted together?

Some specialty coffee drinks call for extra ingredients to lift the aroma and add complexity. To help those aromas blend more naturally with the coffee, some people add them before extraction even begins — extracting them together with the coffee.

(Looks dramatic — don't try this at home!)

Examples: sprinkling osmanthus flowers onto the coffee puck before pulling a shot, so the espresso picks up an osmanthus aroma; adding sugar to the grounds for a more "natural" sweetness; or tucking a piece of butter into the grounds before tamping so the extracted coffee melds with the butter. But ideals are one thing — does extracting together really fuse coffee and ingredient better? FrontStreet Coffee ran an experiment to find out.

Extraction Experiment

The purpose is simple. Some believe that extracting an ingredient together with the coffee tastes more natural than preparing them separately. So the experiment compares the two methods directly: is mixed extraction really superior, as imagined?

The espresso bean this time was Warm Sun Blend: 20g, a 1:2 coffee-to-liquid ratio, ground at setting 1 on a Galileo Q18 grinder, 30-second extraction, target liquid weight of 38ml. The test ingredient: 5g of sugar — chosen because it's easy to work with and doesn't require much cleanup.

With the introductions done, we added the sugar to one portion of grounds before tamping it into a puck, then tamped as usual.

The other portion went straight into the cup, waiting to meet the espresso. Then we locked both portafilters into the machine and extracted.

Extraction complete! The sugar-free espresso finished exactly on spec at 30 seconds. We stirred the coffee and sugar together thoroughly and tasted immediately. No jarring sensation at all — the sugar's sweetness blended with the Warm Sun Blend's whiskey aroma and butter cookie notes into something like a liquor-filled toffee.

The espresso extracted with sugar in the puck fared far worse. It reached the 38ml target in under 20 seconds! The taste achieved none of the desired effect — instead it showed the hallmarks of uneven extraction: sharp acidity and burnt bitterness. The flavors kept their separate identities, each holding its own territory without any fusion.

Why Did This Happen?

Simple: channeling. FrontStreet Coffee has run experiments before on extracting butter together with coffee, but whether it's butter or sugar, these water-soluble substances dissolve on contact with water. When that happens inside the puck, the puck's structure is compromised — riddled with cavities left behind by the dissolved material.

Those cavities are channels: water concentrates its flow through them. Worse, a structurally weakened puck cannot resist high-pressure extraction or slow the hot water's penetration, so during extraction the coffee seeps out in a spray. Hitting the target liquid weight that quickly means the hot water never had enough contact time, so extraction efficiency collapses. Only the grounds along the channels get concentrated extraction; everywhere else the coffee is under-extracted.

Non-dissolvable ingredients (like flowers) don't work either. Their size and density differ from coffee grounds, so they still create channels that let water slip through too easily — producing the same uneven extraction.

So FrontStreet Coffee's advice: if you want to add a distinctive flavor to your coffee, extract the espresso first, then incorporate the ingredient afterwards. It is the most conservative method — and the proper one.

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FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Experiments like this need a dependable espresso base, and FrontStreet Coffee's blends are built for exactly that. The Classic Blend — also the bean behind our Warm Sun Blend-style traditional profiles — is designed for espresso machines and moka pots, with crema as its standout feature: even on a basic home machine it pulls a dense, silky golden layer, and a touch of robusta in the old-school recipe brings butter, nut, spice, dark chocolate, and toast aromas with a wild, thick body that makes latte art effortless.

Prefer nutty notes over crema? Our Premium Blend (Brazil Cerrado and Colombia Huila) and Dark Cocoa Blend offer comfortable sweet-bitter balance and creamy peanut character — the Dark Cocoa even carries the plum-like acidity of Yunnan arabica and a cream-chocolate fragrance when ground, making it a versatile base for lattes, americanos, and signature drinks alike. And if you want a single-origin shot, our Natural Huakui SOE from Guji, Ethiopia (grown up to 2,300 meters) delivers creamy strawberry, cocoa, berries, and light florals through milk — proof that flavor belongs after extraction, not inside the puck.