The Truly Absurd Secrets Of An Incredible Americano

TITLE: The Truly Absurd Secrets of An Incredible Americano CHANNEL: James Hoffmann DATE: 2026-04-27 ---TRANSCRIPT---

• Today, we’re gonna talk about the Americano. It’s a complicated drink to me. Not that it’s hard to make. Quite the opposite. It’s a complicated drink because I have a very difficult relationship with them. I like filter coffee. I like well-brewed, delicious filter coffee, which is a different drink to an Americano, but, well, maybe this has happened to you. You’ve gone to a coffee shop and you’ve said, “Ooh, I’ll get a filter coffee, please.” And the barista’s like, “Ah, no, we’re not - we’re not doing filter right now. An Americano okay?” And inside, you wanna be like, “No, it’s not okay, ‘cause it’s a different drink!” That’s the basis of my complicated relationship with it. Now, the Americano, I think, hasn’t been optimized or thought about the way that a bunch of other coffee drinks that we serve have. We put a lot of time and attention into our espresso. We really focus on our filter coffee. The Americano, for me, has fallen through the cracks. Now, today, we’re gonna cover a few little things, some of which are, I admit, absurd, that will make Americanos significantly, notably, and delightfully more delicious. I’m sure you’re familiar with what an Americano is. It’s a very simple drink. It’s an espresso diluted down with hot water to kind of match filter coffee. It picks up its name from the drink that was created for the Americans stationed in Italy after World War II, who wanted coffee a little bit more like the coffee they drank at home, a little bit weaker. One thing that always bothered me about that story is that if you know your espresso history, you know that modern espresso, strong espresso, that wasn’t until 1948 that it was invented, Achille Gaggia. Before 1948, espresso was actually much closer to American filter coffee than it was to modern espresso. It was rapidly brewed filter coffee, essentially. Yeah, it was probably a little bit stronger, but not that much stronger. So, I guess this must have happened really more in the 1950s and maybe had nothing to do with the soldiers and was just a reference to American coffee culture. I don’t know. There is a little technical challenge in espresso. When you brew an espresso, you have to use a very fine grind and you have to use only a little bit of water to create this very strong beverage at the end of it. That means it’s difficult often with a lighter roasted coffee to extract all the flavors out of it. You just don’t have enough solvent, enough water to do the job. That’s why coffees that are sort of roasted for espresso brewing tend to be roasted a little bit darker. A filter coffee doesn’t have that trouble, right? You can use all of your water, all of your brew water to extract lighter roasted coffees, and so it’s a sort of easier extraction. And the Americano kinda lives in the middle ‘cause you have to do an espresso extraction first and then dilute it down. I did read somewhere, I believe it’s the first Illy textbook, that when you dilute an espresso, actually, you have a lower concentration of oil, that makes sense, and that increases the perceived bitterness of the beverage, right? The bitterness of the espresso is kind of masked by its strength. But when you dilute it for Americano, you tend to experience a little bit more bitterness, which is something I would say is mostly true or sort of correlates with my experience. That isn’t a problem in filter coffee because you’re using a lighter roast and you’re not having to compromise the roast because you have loads of water to do the extraction. That’s the beginning of the problem, but it’s not the only problem. What we’re gonna try and achieve today is a few different things. We’re gonna try and make a less bitter, more complex, more enjoyable Americano without necessarily brewing the espresso any differently. In addition, iced Americanos, I think, are quite a complicated drink for me. I find them typically, incredibly bitter and kind of attacking, and there is now a reasonably popular alternative to it that we do want to talk about today as well. Let’s get into it. So, here, we are brewing the traditional Americano. You know it, you might drink it, you might love it. You might feel, as I do, frustrated by its existence. Now, I’ll taste you this in a second as a kind of benchmark for the day. You think, probably, we’re gonna spend a lot of time talking about optimizing the espresso. You’d be kinda wrong. The first thing I think we can optimize on this is the water underneath the coffee. Now, you’re probably thinking, sensibly, “Oh, I should use maybe different mineral content.” Sure, you could maybe mess with the buffer in there, you could use distilled water instead of mineralized water. You do a bunch of stuff, I guess, but you probably don’t wanna put distilled water inside your coffee machine. And if you’re getting the hot water from your coffee machine, that might not work. But it turns out getting the water from the machine, it’s kind of a problem anyway. Now, this machine doesn’t do a hot water dispense. I better get a different one to explain one of the key problems with most Americanos served almost everywhere. (coffee machine thuds) (James grunts) All right, forgive the mess and the chaos that we’ve somehow instantly created. And I needed this ‘cause it’s like a mini commercial machine. It works the same as most commercial machines, though I will say, more and more domestic machines work the same way. What am I talking about? This machine has a dedicated steam boiler. This one also has a brew boiler, which is separate. Some machines will use a heat exchanger for heating the brewing water. This one just has a dedicated coffee boiler. But if you have a machine that has a steam boiler that holds water above boiling point in order to create steam pressure, then you’re gonna have a little bit of an issue if you use that water for your Americano. You see, the water that you put in, when it’s evaporated and turned to steam, begins to concentrate. So, if you only ever use your machine’s steam and never pull any water out of your steam boiler, that water will become increasingly concentrated. That could potentially lead to more scale forming in the water. That’s a thing to consider. Now, many people use this water for things like tea or an Americano. (coffee machine humming) Now, you might think, “Hey, this water is great. I have great water coming out of the tap. It’s suitable for coffee making.” Or maybe you make your own water. We do that, it’s not that weird. Shut up, it’s not that weird. So you know that the water coming out here is suitable for coffee. But it turns out it just doesn’t taste great as an Americano. Now, I’m trying to scratch my brain back and work out who it was. I think it was World Barista Champion Gwilym Davies, co-founder of The Naughty Dog in Czechia, who put me onto this idea, but he said, “What if we heated the water fresh each time for an Americano?” And I thought, “That’s inconvenient. It would have to taste much better.” It turns out it does. It really does. How am I asking you to heat the water? Am I asking you to boil a kettle? Maybe I don’t have a kettle. Am I saying pull it out of the brew group? No, none of these. I’m gonna suggest we steam cold water hot and use that for our Americanos. Stay with me. That’s right, I said we’re gonna steam water. And if you’ve ever steamed water before, you know it doesn’t sound good, so I apologize for the sound. I’m gonna steam this. I’m not gonna steam it to boiling point ‘cause I don’t want it to be boiling. I would like it to be a suitable temperature, so we’re gonna aim for maybe 65, 70 degrees Celsius, which is plenty hot enough for a nice, hot beverage, and then we can brew our espresso on top of that. (steam wand hissing) (Thermometer beeping) It’s done! (chuckles)

If you’re starting to type a comment out of sheer rage and irritation, I understand, I understand. I don’t like that this is true, but it is astonishing how different this is. Let me finish this drink. (coffee machine hums) We’ve done numerous tastings, and every time, every time, the steam water is significantly better than the water from the machine. I know what you’re thinking, “What about the kettle? I have a kettle. Don’t make me steam water.” Turns out you can still tell steamed from the kettle. Now, the theorists out there, and I might be one of them, will say something about dissolved gases. That’ll be it, right? Like when you’re steaming the water, we’re introducing air. Is there more dissolved oxygen in that water? Does that change the taste of the coffee? I don’t know, I don’t have a dissolved oxygen meter. But when you steam nice water to a suitable temperature and make an Americano with it, the change in taste and texture is notable. A lot of what I don’t like about an Americano can be a combination of bitterness and astringency, a kind of harshness, a little bit of bite to it. That is significantly diminished when you steam the water. Now, obviously, it’s very nice that the temperature’s a little bit low. It’s a bit more drinkable straight away. You might theorize that adding espresso to slightly cooler water maybe degrade the flavor compared to adding it to boiling hot water. I don’t know if that’s true, it may be true, but still, then the kettle should be as good as the steam, and it’s not. And so, you get a kind of more pronounced sweetness, a more pleasing texture, a nicer finish, and you can tell in a blind tasting comfortably. It’s wild. Now, if you are thinking that’s the most absurd thing you’re gonna see in this video today, settle in, get comfortable, because it’s not. And speaking of being comfortable, well, I think this is a perfect time for a short ad from this video sponsor, Bombas. 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That was a very long time ago, and thankfully, it doesn’t exist anymore. The simple version of this is, crema tastes bad. It looks good, it looks cool, it looks beautiful. It’s a good visual indicator of freshness and strength and roast level in the coffee. It says nothing to the quality of flavor, but it looks cool. Turns out in an espresso, if you remove the crema, the espresso tastes nicer, less bitter, more complex, more enjoyable. People get really, really angry about this fact and dispute it to some extent, but mostly they’re just angry that this is kind of true. And I’m not advocating removing crema from your espresso day to day, but when you turn this espresso into an Americano, I really, really do think it’s worth the effort to strip the crema off that drink. Get rid of it. Don’t consume it. Don’t have a teaspoon full of that. It’s not a good time. You’ll discover why we think we should remove it. Actually, no! No, YOU have a teaspoon of crema! See how you feel. I don’t know why I’m angry with you. You’ve done nothing wrong. If I’m served an Americano, I will do this wherever I can. It is just worth doing. And in an espresso, no, probably not. It’s gonna be gone so soon. You want the texture, you just wanna get on with it and have a nice experience. An Americano, though, it lasts for longer. Again, the bitterness is more pronounced. If I can reduce that, that’s a total win. Now, most of the time, sensible places are gonna brew onto hot water. Nowhere really anymore does the whole espresso first, water in afterwards if they really care, and so it is quite easy to remove that crema. I should show you. (steam wand hissing) Look at my ultimate Americano water. Mm? (coffee machine burbling) This is easier with two teaspoons. (teaspoons clinking) Take that creamy, creamy crema. Throw it away. You could do this yourself actually. If you have a splitter on your portafilter, make two mini Americanos and skim the crema off just one of them, and taste them side by side. And you will pick the one that has the crema skimmed off unless you really, really, really like dark roast and tons of bitterness. But if you want a bit more life and complexity, almost a touch more acid in there, a touch more vibrance, the skimmed one works better. Now, I had a thought. Crema - I don’t like crema in Americano, okay? But crema is a couple things. crema mostly tastes bad because in amongst the foam, there are little tiny pieces of suspended coffee. That’s what we tend to see as tiger striping in a sort of pretty-looking espresso. It’s little bits of coffee. And if you eat a coffee bean, don’t generally do that, because people do, but I don’t like that. It’s quite bitter. Like, the eating pieces of coffee is quite bitter. So, when you skim the crema off, you do remove that. Now, the other function of crema is carbon dioxide. When you roast coffee, one of the byproducts is carbon dioxide. It’s trapped in the bean. When you brew coffee under pressure, water is able to absorb more CO2 than it can at room temperature, so it becomes super saturated in the puck. It’s very exciting. When it leaves the puck, can’t hold onto the CO2 anymore, and it comes out of solution, and it forms a foam. Crema, that’s what that is. And I was like, what if, and I haven’t done this experiment yet, so we’re gonna do it together, what if you could fully degas an Americano? What would happen then? Could you get some more CO2 out? Would it taste better? How would you do that? Well, if it’s pressure related, we could put it in a partial vacuum. Now, most people don’t have a partial vacuum, but we have a machine that makes a partial vacuum, which we could put a coffee cup in. Should we find out what happens when we fully degas an Americano? Here’s what we’re gonna do. Firstly, this is a chamber vacuum. Use it to sort of seal bags that you might cook sous vide or vacuum-sealed products like coffee. I guess you could put coffee in here and vacuum seal if you wanna freeze it for a long time. What these do is pull a partial vacuum, so they pull out all of the air in the chamber when it’s sealed, or most of the air, and as you reduce the pressure inside the chamber, boiling points rapidly decrease, but also, water should be less and less able to hold onto the CO2. Now, the challenge will be, the water will very quickly start to boil as the pressure is reduced, and we’ll see some boiling happening here. But before that water starts to really boil, maybe we’re gonna get rid of some CO2. I honestly don’t know. We’re gonna pull a double espresso. We’re gonna remove the crema, ‘cause of course, we are. We’re then gonna stir it thoroughly and add it to 80 grams of freshly steamed water. One will be a control and one will go in here. We’re gonna weigh this one before and after to see how much evaporation occurred, hopefully minimal, and we’ll top it back up to be inappropriate strength again afterwards. Then we’ll do a little switcheroo, blind taste, and I’ll see what the deal is ‘cause I haven’t done this before, and this might go horribly wrong. It’s nice to find out. Let’s get on with it. (steam wand hissing) (coffee machine burbling) (teaspoons clinking) Get rid of my crema. Oh, magical. 40 grams, exactly. (water trickling) 80 grams of freshly steamed perfect Americano water. I don’t like that this is true. I’m gonna keep saying it, but you should know that it’s true, right? I’m not angry. You are. Okay, remember this number, 307.2. (vacuum chamber whirring) (vacuum chamber whirring) Oh, it’s boiling. Ooh! (vacuum chamber hisses) How much did we lose? Oh, we made a mess. All right, well, we’re down a little bit. We’re down a little bit. We’re down to 304.2. Now, I’d say there’s probably three grams of liquid there. I don’t think we’ve meaningfully lost water to evaporation. (cups clinking) Now, usually, we like a triangle test here. I don’t mind admitting that. This is just the first, the first thing - Does it work? Does it do anything? We’ll find out. Okay. Those are dramatically different. I don’t know which is which. This one is silky in comparison to this. So, either a vacuum chamber ruins a good Americano or it massively improves it. But this is weirdly silky and smooth in comparison. Which one is it? The vacuum chamber made it worse?

• [Sarka] Mm-hmm.
• Interesting. Sarka pointed out, this is like steamed versus kettled all over again, right? Or steam boiler versus steamed fresh where… Is it a dissolved gases thing? Did we rob this one of dissolved gases? God, that’s such questionable science, but I want to know now. I really want a dissolved oxygen meter or something because the difference is dramatic. It’s shocking, really. Like, this is so much nicer than this, and so maybe this is not a friend of coffee at all. And actually, dissolved gases of all kinds are welcome, even if we think CO2 might be bad. That is weird how different those are, and it just seems to correlate kind of interestingly to the whole steaming the water thing. Someone smarter than me show up in the comments, please, please. Has anyone done dissolved gases in coffee beverages as a thing? I guess nitro, which does lead us to the next drink. All of this talk is steaming water, and we do need to acknowledge the elephant in the room, if you’re not familiar with it, the aerocano. “What is this?” you might ask. Well, it turns out it goes back, I think, to 2021. It’s hard to find the origins. There’s Reddit posts from back then. There’s discussions in coffee communities back then. There are some early videos on YouTube about it. What is it? Well, if I had to have a least favorite Americano, it would probably be the iced Americano. It’s just a very intense, very bitter drink. And people came up with a better way. This is not my idea. If you make an iced Americano by brewing an espresso, adding it to ice water, and steaming the ice water, what happens is this. The steam will melt the ice, but the beverage won’t get much hotter, but as it’s being steamed, you will whip in a bunch of foam and create some really lovely texture so that what you end up with essentially looks like a nitro called brew, and has much the same texture. It is a very enjoyable drink to me in comparison to a traditional iced Americano, especially if you do the extra steps like skim the crema. If you’re really paranoid about bitter, I think a drop of saline is no bad thing in here either. Let me show you just quickly that particular drink. (coffee machine burbling) (coffee trickling) So, in here, we’ve got our double espresso. We’ve got 85 grams of ice and 65 grams of cold, delicious water. We’re gonna steam that for about 10 seconds. Good things will happen. (steam wand hissing) Just a little one for me, just for now. Look at that! Look at it settling out. The death nail for this drink has been sounded. This is on the menu at Starbucks in Korea now, the aerocano. Sweetened, of course. This is an interesting little beverage. Let’s give it a taste. Super fluffy! Nice strength of coffee flavor. Feels really nice to drink. That softness from the foam is very enjoyable. And again, the crema has nothing to do with this. This is just all espresso, will foam if you ask it to. And whipping in that air does create this luxurious foam. That versus a traditional iced Americano, night and day, and totally worth giving an experiment to when the weather turns hot and you want a quick iced black coffee that has great, great texture. Voice from the galleries correctly saying, “Hey, if steaming makes good texture and steaming water is good for a hot Americano, why not add your delicious skimemed/crema-deskimmed espresso to cold water, and steam it hot for a hot Americano? Why don’t you do that?” It’s gonna make a different beverage, it’s gonna be a foamy, foamy beverage, but will it be good? We should find out. (coffee machine burbling) All right, we don’t have a lot of steaming time. We’re at 29 degrees Celsius. Let’s see what happens. (steam wand hissing) Hot nitro Americano. This reminds me of the weird beverage that we once got investigating a Nespresso Vertuo. (coffee machine whirring) Oh, yeah, look at my crema. Link down below. Okay, this is settled out much faster, which is interesting. And we’ve just basically made a slightly foamed Americano. All right, cheers. (James thinking) It’s pretty good! (laughs) It feels different. It feels like a different beverage here. It feels like a black coffee cappuccino in a weird sort of way. Like it’s got the sort of the texture. The silkiness is slightly unsettling and weird. I don’t know what it’s doing to flavor. I maybe had too much coffee at this point. It’s not bad. I don’t know, I think I’d be slightly weirded out if you served this to me as an Americano. It feels like another drink again. Like, there’s filter coffee, the Americano, and then this lives off in the side. There’s not much in the way of flaws here. Like, it’s sweet, complex, silky, minimally bitter. Can I justify why I’m unsettled by this? I don’t know. The hot aerocano, apparently, a thing. I’m sure someone else has done this. We should check on the internet. If they have, we’ll try and credit them on screen. If they haven’t, there it is. Now, a few of these tips have gone between things you can do if you’re buying an Americano or making an Americano. This goes back to if you’re making Americano. If you like filter coffee, but you’re stuck with an espresso-only setup, then I think you could wrap all of these up as kind of tips in terms of steamed water, skimming crema, and work with light roasted filter-style coffee. The secret will be if you brew espresso that way, is to not focus on texture anymore. Espresso, for me, is a very texture-driven thing, but you could pull kind of a lungo with a filter coffee. By that, I mean you’re gonna let it flow a little faster, so your grind will be courser, but you’re gonna use a good bit more liquid. So, where you might brew, I say, 18 grams in, 40 grams of liquid espresso out for a traditional espresso, sometimes more. Here, you’d be going 18 grams in and pushing it out to 60, 65, 70 grams of liquid out, and letting it flow faster, but still aiming for a balanced and tasty beverage. It’s dialing in. You’re gonna get the grind right, it’ll taste really good, but you’ll have a nice, even extraction that way. And then if you take the crema off that, if you add it to some steamed water, you will get a very enjoyable, pretty filter coffee-like beverage that is, I think, delicious. And yes, there are people brewing kind of complex, very long cups of filter coffee through an espresso machine, but I think this is kind of the better hack, for want of a better term, to get to a filter style-coffee in terms of complexity and flavor and enjoyment from an espresso machine. So, to wrap us up, that’s my final tip. If you’re gonna brew filter-style coffee, lighter roasts that are harder to extract, just go for that much longer style espresso. 60, 70 grams out, probably at least from 18 grams. Yeah, it’s gonna be a very watery espresso, but you’re gonna dilute it with water anyway, so that doesn’t matter. It’s all about flavor. And there, I think, you’ll get lovely complexity, great acids, great sweetness, and a very good time. I know a bunch of you’ll have questions about this machine. This is the Wendougee Lita. It’s an interesting espresso machine, and there will be a review on the channel soon. When it’s available, we’ll make sure it’s linked in the description below. All right, now I wanna to hear from you down at those comments below. We have asked for some help around some stuff like dissolved gases in coffee. Is that a thing? Can you answer those questions? But if you can’t, there’s a few more things we’d love to know. If you try these out, did they work for you as promised? Did you do an A/B test? Did you try a new thing? Do you drink Americanos out of choice? Do you not drink Americanos out of choice? And actually, could this tempt you back? Any and all feedback is welcome down in those comments below, but for now, I will say thank you so much for watching, and I hope you have a great day.