Drink of the week: Caffè Americano
Very often in the course of doing mobile coffee gigs, a customer will study the menu and ask simply “Do you have… just coffee?”
Now we pride ourselves on being un-pretentious coffee people. Enjoying a cup of coffee shouldn’t be a complicated business. What these customers are really asking for is for a drip coffee—the most ubiquitous and American of all coffees. Coarsely ground grocery store coffee, passed with hot water through a paper filter. It’s the staple of everyday accessible coffee. Even more commonly, they might be thinking of granulated instant coffee, the kind GIs drank out of tin cups in the trenches of WWII.
Now at Sparkplug, we don’t typically serve drip coffee. Not that there’s anything wrong with it! It’s just that our cafe is 6 feet long by 4 feet 6 inches wide. We’ve made a lot of decisions to save space, and the most crucial of which was that we would specialize in espresso-based drinks and this leaves no room for a drip coffee machine.
Luckily, there’s an espresso-based substitute that satisfies almost all “just coffee” drinkers: the Americano. While a double shot of espresso is about 2 ounces, far shy of the 8-12 most hot drip coffees weigh in at, it has the advantage of being more concentrated. So to approximate a drip coffee you just have to… add water. Really. that’s it.
So where did such a simple drink get its name?
<Disclaimer: the following story is quite likely apocryphal but let’s just have fun anyway!>
Following WWII, US troops remained in the Italian peninsula, birthplace of espresso. Suddenly, tens of thousands of men who were used to canned Folgers and Maxwell House in the trenches and back home, were introduced to true Italian espresso!. And they were… underwhelmed. While modern America has undergone second and third wave coffee (more about those in another post), this was the late 1940s and those young men just couldn’t fathom why they were being handed 2 ounce thimbles and told it was a cup of Joe. They wanted more coffee! Or at least, more drink. No they didn’t want foamy cappuccinos. Just more coffee, per favore. I’m sure this led to many a nonplussed and grumpy Italian barista.
With many a “cha cazz’…” the baristas finally came up with a solution: just pour some more hot water into the cup for the Americans. It really was that simple. Soon the baristas would just call the drink “the American” or “Americano”.
So there you have it. The origins of the drink. But why would anyone order it today, if it’s just an imitation of a different drink? Plenty of reasons. For starters, some people prefer the taste of the espresso. The extraction process involving pressure brings forward a different flavor profile than the slow drip. Just a shot of espresso might be too concentrated and the coffee drinking experience over too quickly. Many prefer not to incorporate milk, as it masks the flavor of the coffee and adds calories (the latter reason makes the drink very popular in diet-conscious South Korea where it’s common knowledge that it only contains 5 calories).
So there you have it. The next time you see Sparkplug around and overhear someone asking for “just a coffee” and see us making an Americano, just know that we’re carrying on a barista tradition older than ourselves.
With that I’ll leave you with a link to a musical tribute to the humble drink, “Americano” by Korean indie group, 10cm.
