oton wrote:Whats that flat white blend?!?
It's a bespoke blend that Square Mile produce for Flat White and Milk Bar, two excellent cafes in Soho, London. Gouezeri is suggesting that it might be less bright than their retail offering, but if it is it's not by much. I've had super-bright (and super-delicious) shots pulled for me in both these cafes.
Oton, I've really enjoyed reading your beautifully illustrated "this is what sour looks like" posts, made me laugh every time! But as someone who divides their time between the UK and Spain (not far from Madrid), perhaps I can shed some light on the taste conundrum.
The espresso you get offered in a typical Madrid bar, and what you'd get offered in, say, Milk Bar, are just totally different drinks. One is made from mostly low grade commidity coffee, usually with a significant proportion roasted torrefacto (ie. sprayed with sugar) to sweeten it up a little. It's probably several months post-roast before you get to drink it. The other is blended from single estate coffees and expertly roasted (often lightly!) to bring out the nuances of the particular beans. It is consumed within a few weeks of roasting at most.
I really used to enjoy Madrid coffee, and would source all my beans for home consumption from Cafes la Mexicana and Cafe y Te. And so I would have gone on quite happily had I not stumbled upon the speciality scene and taken up home roasting. These days, I buy mostly greens but every now and then treat myself to something from one of the leading UK roasters to see what I'm aiming for. Like you, with my palate tuned to Madrid torrefacto, I initially found these way too acidic. Like you, I then started to question everything about my espresso technique - grind, dose, temperature - but nothing I did would tone down that acidity very much. Then I took myself down to London one day, spent a highly caffeinated day sampling espressos at some of Soho's finest cafes (with frequent pit stops at Princi for cake...) until it dawned on me: it's supposed to taste like this!
For the rest of my story, I think Jossy summed it all up nicely earlier in this thread. I came to love this style of coffee and find that it offers so much more, in terms of complexity and nuance, than what I was happily drinking before. So when your Square Mile summer espresso arrives next week, don't worry about your technique (the kit you've got is more than capable of bringing the best out of it), but instead try to ask yourself what it is that people like about this stuff! Look beyond the acidity - which should be positively refreshing - to the depth of flavour beneath it. And if you can't find anything, well that's no problem at all, everyone has different tastes, and you're lucky since there are plenty of places in Madrid where you can pick up the style of coffee you like!
Hasta luego,
Andrew