Stop making watery Americanos

I hate weak coffee. When I walk into a specialty coffee place and they serve me a watery americano, I think of the coffee my parents used to choke down at church on Sunday mornings when I was a kid. They’d pour themselves a full 300mL of percolated coffee and you’d be able to see the bottom of the mug. I guess people weren’t donating enough for them to add additional Folger’s to the batch brew basket. In college, the folks at the dining hall brewed the same sort of budget coffee we had at church, and one friend poignantly referred to it as “sock water”. I hate sock water coffee. It tastes like bad hangovers and sweaty elbows, like moldy cardboard dipped in Minnesota pond water. There is no excuse for weak coffee. If I wanted weak coffee I’d just crush a caffeine tablet into some over-steeped Rooibos¹.

More than the taste, my biggest issue with weak coffee is the texture. Proper strength coffee feels slightly viscous, almost velvety on the tongue. Sometimes it sort of coats the palette like good chicken stock. Weak coffee has none of these characteristics – it feels the same as drinking hot water.

So, instead of watery americanos, what should cafes serve up? In my mind, an americano is for when I want to savor a shot of espresso. Instead of drinking it in two or three sips, it takes me six or seven. The ratio of water to espresso should be 1:1, or 3:2 max. An americano is not a substitute for a 300mL cup of filter coffee – diluting 40g of espresso down to that volume results in sock water. If you want to drink a large volume of coffee, order some filter coffee.