Gaggia, Baby!

I think as soon as I tasted Espresso I was hooked. It might have been the strong coffee in Denmark, or an inner caffeine drug dependency.

I started with one of those funky Italian espresso pots that makes coffee via a inner funnel that contains the ground coffee and when placed on the stove boils the water in the bottom compartment and the resulting pressure forces the water through the grounds into the top section. Pretty good stuff but I needed something more.

I then bought a low-priced Krups espresso maker at a local department store. It was a pump machine, meaning that a pump forced the heated water through the ground espresso coffee and into a cup. This worked pretty well but I still needed something more.

Enter Baby Gaggia. This is an Italian machine that provided a major improvement from the Krups. Crema is one of the marks of a good cup of Espresso, and I now have good crema. What is crema? It's a brown froth at the top of your cup of coffee. It rather reminds me of a root beer float where you have partially mixed the vanilla ice cream and the root beer.

One has to fiddle and experiment to get a perfect cup. The grind of the beans, the pressure you apply whilst tamping the coffee into the basket of your machine, what beans to use, the humidity of the surroundings and other mysteries too profound to express.

More on this subject in future postings.