How To Make A Ristretto Coffee

We're going to talk about how to make a ristretto. Now, a ristretto is really a strong and powerful form of espresso. Now, to do this, it's very simple.

We're going to do the same process as we would for double espresso and instead of extracting at around about 20 or 22 seconds for the particular coffee that I'm using, we're actually going to be looking at extracting it at about 12 or 13 seconds, so almost half the time and that will give us a good 30 mls of water. So, for me, underneath and two clicks forward of my machine, we've got 14 grams of coffee into my portafilter. We're then going to tamp this down and if you need to know how to tamp, you can check out the video in the series that's called How to Tamp Coffee.

So, we do that and once we've got that in there, we're going to put it back into our coffee machine, into the group head at the top and we're going to press either the free-flow or the double espresso button. It doesn't matter because we're going to stop it when we get to about 12 or 13 seconds. On this machine, I've got a countdown timer.

Otherwise, you might have to be doing it yourself in your head, just counting through from the moment you press the button until, for us, we get to 13 seconds. When we've done that, we just press the button to stop it again, we take this away and we're left with a double ristretto. And that is how to make a double ristretto. .