The Truly Absurd Secrets of An Incredible Americano

ELI5/TLDR

The Americano is a neglected drink — espresso plus hot water, treated as an afterthought. Hoffmann reckons it can be dramatically better with three slightly absurd moves: don’t use the hot water tap on the espresso machine (it tastes flat from sitting in the steam boiler), instead steam cold water up to about 67°C and pour the espresso onto that. Skim the crema off before drinking. For iced, make an “aerocano” — steam-foam espresso with ice water until it goes nitro-cold-brew silky.

The Full Story

Hoffmann doesn’t really like Americanos. He likes filter coffee. The Americano is the drink the barista offers you when filter is off — espresso shoved into hot water, pretending to be the same thing. It’s not. And because nobody really cares about the Americano, nobody has bothered to optimize it the way they’ve optimized espresso and pour-over.

He starts with the origin story and quietly knocks it over. The legend says American GIs stationed in Italy after WWII wanted a weaker drink, so the Americano was born. But modern strong espresso wasn’t invented until 1948 (Achille Gaggia and his lever machine). Before that, espresso was basically just rapidly brewed filter coffee. So the GIs wouldn’t have been diluting anything especially intense. Hoffmann shrugs and says it probably happened in the 1950s and was just a nod to American coffee culture.

Why an Americano tastes worse than its parts

There’s a fundamental tension. Espresso uses very fine grinds and very little water, which makes it hard to fully extract lighter-roasted coffees — there isn’t enough solvent (water) to do the job. So espresso roasters tend to roast darker. Filter coffee doesn’t have this problem; you can use light roasts and plenty of water.

The Americano sits awkwardly in the middle. You pull a darker-roasted espresso, then dilute it. According to the first Illy textbook, dilution drops the oil concentration and pushes the perceived bitterness up — the strength was hiding the bitterness, and now there’s nowhere to hide. Result: a drink that tastes more bitter and astringent than the espresso it came from.

Trick one: steam your water

Most commercial machines (and increasingly, domestic ones) have a separate steam boiler that holds water above boiling point. People often draw hot water from this boiler for tea or Americanos. Problem: that water has been sitting there, partly evaporating and concentrating, possibly accumulating scale. It just doesn’t taste fresh.

A World Barista Champion named Gwilym Davies once told Hoffmann to heat the water fresh every time. Not from a kettle — using the steam wand to steam cold water up to about 65–70°C. Hoffmann says this sounds annoying, did it anyway, and the difference is genuinely shocking. Steamed water beats kettle water beats steam-boiler water in blind tastings, every time.

He doesn’t know why. His best guess is dissolved gases — when you steam, you whip air into the water, possibly raising dissolved oxygen. He’s slightly furious that this works. “I don’t like that this is true,” he says, more than once.

Trick two: skim the crema

Crema is the orange foam on top of an espresso. Hoffmann has been saying it tastes bad for over a decade. People still get angry about it. His position: crema looks gorgeous and tells you the coffee is fresh, but it adds nothing nice to the flavor.

Two things are happening in crema. First, suspended bits of ground coffee — the same particles that produce that pretty tiger-striping pattern. Coffee grounds, eaten directly, are bitter. Second, carbon dioxide. When coffee roasts, it produces CO2, which gets trapped in the bean. Under espresso pressure, water absorbs more CO2 than it normally could (think shaken soda). When the espresso leaves the puck and the pressure drops, the CO2 comes back out as foam. That’s crema.

In a regular espresso, the crema is gone in seconds and you don’t really notice. In an Americano, it lingers and pushes the whole drink toward bitterness. Skim it off with two teaspoons. Throw it away. The drink underneath becomes sweeter, more vibrant, with a touch more acid.

The vacuum experiment that backfires

Hoffmann reasons: if CO2 in crema is bad, what if I pull all the dissolved CO2 out of the whole drink? He puts an Americano in a chamber vacuum sealer (the kind used for sous vide). The water boils at room temperature as the pressure drops, but only loses about three grams.

Side-by-side blind taste with a control: the vacuum-treated one is dramatically worse. The control is silky, the degassed one is harsh. Hoffmann’s hypothesis flips on him in real time. Maybe dissolved gases of all kinds — including CO2 — are actually a friend of coffee. Same pattern as the steam vs. kettle finding. He pleads for someone in the comments to bring a dissolved oxygen meter and proper science.

Iced Americanos: the “aerocano”

Iced Americanos are Hoffmann’s least favorite drink — intense and aggressively bitter. The fix, which has been floating around Reddit since around 2021 and is now on Starbucks Korea menus: pull a double espresso, add it to ice water (85g ice + 65g cold water), then steam the whole thing for about ten seconds. The steam barely warms the drink — it just melts a little ice — but it whips a thick, silky foam into the espresso. The result looks and drinks like nitro cold brew. He throws in a drop of saline if you want to push bitterness down further.

He then tries the inverse — espresso into cold water, steamed hot — and gets a strange “hot aerocano” that tastes like a black-coffee cappuccino. Sweet, silky, almost too smooth. He’s slightly weirded out by it but admits it has no real flaws.

Bonus tip: the long espresso

If you’re stuck with espresso-only gear but actually want filter coffee, pull a longer-than-usual shot. Normal espresso: 18g of grounds in, ~40g of liquid out. Filter-style hack: 18g in, 60–70g out. Coarser grind, faster flow, lighter roast. It’ll be a watery espresso, but you’re going to dilute it anyway. Skim the crema, top with steamed water, and you’ve got a passable filter coffee from your espresso machine.

Key Takeaways — the actual recipe

Hot Americano (Hoffmann method):

Steam cold water with the steam wand to ~65–70°C (he hits 67°C). Don’t draw hot water from the steam boiler.
Pull a normal double espresso onto that water.
Skim the crema off with two teaspoons. Discard.

Iced Americano / Aerocano:

Glass: 85g ice + 65g cold water.
Pull a double espresso into it.
Steam-wand the whole thing for ~10 seconds. Foam happens.
Optional: drop of saline if it’s still bitter.

Filter-style Americano from an espresso machine:

18g grounds in, 60–70g liquid out (long shot, coarser grind, lighter roast).
Add to steamed water. Skim crema.

The science (such as it is):

Dilution increases perceived bitterness. Espresso strength masks bitterness; once diluted, the bitter notes step forward. Source: Illy textbook.
Crema is two things: suspended coffee particles (bitter) + CO2 foam from supersaturation under brew pressure.
Dissolved gases probably matter. Steam-fresh water tastes better than kettle water tastes better than steam-boiler water. Vacuum-degassing makes coffee notably worse. Hoffmann’s working theory: dissolved O2 (and maybe CO2) is good, but the science isn’t settled — he’s openly asking the internet for help.

Claude’s Take

8/10. This is Hoffmann at his best — taking a drink everyone has stopped thinking about, asking small questions, and producing two or three genuinely actionable changes plus one experiment that breaks his own hypothesis on camera. He doesn’t dress up the science he doesn’t have. The vacuum chamber result is the most honest moment of the video: he expected to confirm CO2 was the villain, found the opposite, and just sits with it. That’s worth more than a clean conclusion.

The steam-the-water trick is the kind of thing that sounds insane and probably is mostly true. Whether it’s dissolved oxygen or some other artifact of the steam wand pulling room air into the water, the blind-tasting evidence is strong enough that the mechanism is a footnote. Skimming the crema is the safe, repeatable win — anyone who’s drunk a sad coffee-shop Americano can probably try this on their next one and feel a difference.

The aerocano section earns its keep. Iced Americanos really are a bad drink, and “steam the whole thing for ten seconds” is the kind of fix that’s elegant enough to feel obvious in retrospect. That it’s now on Starbucks Korea menus suggests this is already past the early-adopter phase.

Why not 9: it’s a niche video, more demonstration than deep science. The CO2-vs-dissolved-O2 thread is tantalizing but unresolved. A point off because Hoffmann himself is asking the audience to do the homework he didn’t.