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

Some specialty coffee products require additional ingredients to enhance aroma and create more complexity. To allow these ingredients' aromas to integrate more naturally with the coffee, coffee professionals add them before extraction begins, extracting them together with the coffee.

(Exaggerated, don't try this at home!)

For example, sprinkling osmanthus flowers onto the coffee puck before espresso extraction to give the extracted espresso an osmanthus aroma; or adding sugar to the coffee grounds to give the extracted espresso a more natural sweetness; or adding a piece of butter to the coffee grounds before tamping to allow the extracted coffee to better combine with the butter. But as everyone knows, ideals are often beautiful—can doing this really help coffee and ingredients fuse better? Let FrontStreet Coffee conduct an experiment to let us see this more intuitively.

Extraction Experiment

The experimental purpose is quite simple. Some friends believe that extracting ingredients together with coffee produces a more natural taste than making them separately. Therefore, our experiment is to compare the differences between the two methods and see if mixed extraction truly produces superior taste compared to separate preparation, as imagined.

The espresso bean used this time is Warm Sun Blend, 20g, with a coffee-to-liquid ratio of 1:2, ground at level 1 on a Galileo Q18 grinder, extraction time of 30 seconds, with a target liquid weight of 38ml. The ingredient to be added is: sugar, 5g! (Sugar was chosen because it's more intuitive to work with and doesn't require as much cleaning)

Now that the introduction is complete, we'll add one portion of sugar to the coffee grounds that are about to be tamped into a puck, then proceed with tamping;

The other portion will be added directly to the coffee cup, waiting to mix with the espresso liquid. Then we'll lock both portafilters onto the coffee machine sequentially for extraction.

Extraction complete! The espresso without sugar extraction time perfectly met the set parameters at 30 seconds. We then took a spoon to stir the coffee and sugar thoroughly, tasting immediately! FrontStreet Coffee discovered there was no jarring sensation—the sweetness of the sugar blended with the Warm Sun Blend's whiskey aroma and butter cookie flavors, creating something like a liquor-filled toffee taste.

However, the espresso extracted with added sugar didn't perform as well. It took less than 20 seconds to extract to the target liquid weight of 38ml! The taste not only completely failed to achieve the desired effect but also showed negative characteristics of uneven extraction such as sharp acidity and burnt bitterness. The flavors maintained their separate identities, occupying their own territories without any fusion!

Why Did This Happen?

It's quite simple—channeling occurred! FrontStreet Coffee previously conducted experiments on adding butter to extract together with coffee, but whether it's butter or sugar, these water-soluble substances dissolve upon contact with water. If they happen to be part of the coffee puck at this time, then after they dissolve, the puck's structure is compromised, filled with cavities left behind by the dissolved materials.

These cavities are what we call channels—because their appearance causes water to concentrate its flow through these areas! Secondly, the structurally compromised puck cannot withstand high-pressure extraction and cannot slow down the penetration speed of hot water. Therefore, during the extraction process, we can see coffee liquid seeping out in a spraying effect! The target liquid weight was extracted in a short time, which means the hot water didn't have sufficient extraction time, making extraction efficiency quite low. Consequently, except for the coffee grounds in the channels that received concentrated extraction, other areas contained under-extracted coffee grounds.

Of course, non-dissolvable ingredients (like flowers) don't work either. Because the size and density of these ingredients are inconsistent with coffee grounds, they still create many channels that allow water to flow easily, leading to uneven extraction phenomena.

Therefore, FrontStreet Coffee suggests that if you want to add unique flavor aromas to your coffee, it's best to extract the espresso first, then prepare it through additional additions. This method is the most conservative and also the most proper approach.

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