The Milk Drink Paradox How Weaker Shots Can Make Stronger Drinks

Today, we're going to talk about making better, more delicious milk drinks, because there's some advice that I see that may be leading you astray. Now, we're going to talk about making better cappuccinos, better flat whites, better macchiatos, and it's going to be relevant whether you drink dairy or non-dairy milk, because while espresso and felted coffee get a lot of love from this channel and other channels, well, milk drinks are very popular, and they deserve some love too. So that's what it's about today. Now, the advice that I see often, that I want to talk about, is this. To make better, stronger-tasting milk drinks, start with a stronger espresso. Pull a ristretto-style shot to get a better milk drink. And initially, half of you might be thinking, yeah, that makes sense. Start with a stronger espresso, get a stronger milk drink. And half of you will be like, wait, that doesn't make any sense. Well, which one of you is right? That's what we're going to get into today. And to start with, I will need two milk drinks, one of which will be made with a double ristretto, one will be made with a more traditional, sort of longer double espresso. So here we have it. On this side here, the double ristretto and cappuccino. And on this side, the weaker shot, the traditional espresso cappuccino over here. This one's stronger. That's the video. Thank you so much for watching. But I kid. I kid. I kid? Well, I don't kid. It is stronger, but I'm going to explain why and how, because I think it's really important to understand it's fundamental to espresso brewing and extremely relevant if you enjoy milk drinks and buying delicious specialty coffee. Now, to explain all of this, two things are going to happen. One, we're going to break this down into its component pieces. And two, we're going to talk a lot today about strength. Strength, we made a whole video about strength once because it's a confusing topic. The word gets misused all the time. Ultimately, strength is a measure of how much stuff, flavor, if you will, you took out of the coffee and how dilute is that in the final drink. Espresso can be anywhere from eight to 12% strength. So really pretty strong. 90% water, but still lots of solids. Felted coffee's down at like 1.3 to maybe 1.5% strength. So much, much weaker on that end. Strength is very relevant, but we're going to get into what makes up strength now. So let's break these apart. So here we are. Here's our kind of abstracted cappuccino. Deconstructed, as it would have been 10 years ago. Someone would have served you this and you'd have to make it yourself, maybe foam it yourself. You'd have had a good time and complained about it afterwards. Anyway, not the point. Here we go. So the ristretto, the longer shot. What we can do with espresso is use a refractometer like this. And what we can then do is put a drop of espresso in here once we've filtered it and it will tell us exactly how much of this is soluble material. So here, let's get the recipe down. I used 18 grams of coffee at the start. I pulled a 32 gram shot out. So definitely more ristretto style, a shorter ratio there. And the strength of this, about 10.8% strength. This one here, however, same starting input. So 18 grams of coffee in the basket, 40 grams out. So a longer shot. And as a result, it is quite a bit weaker. It's gone from 10.8 down to 9.2%. So a big drop in its strength. If you know the strength of something and how much of something you have, you can just calculate out the literal mass of sort of solid material dissolved in these two espressos. And to show you that, let's get really abstract. Let's break everything down into its component pieces. Do I win a prize for the ugliest cappuccino of all time? The least appealing one? Probably not actually. But this is the truly, truly deconstructed cappuccino. We've broken apart the milk, broken apart the coffee too. So if we look over here, represented by instant coffee, which is basically dried soluble material, we've got 3.46 grams in this drink over here. But because the other shot is longer, it's pulled out more solids. It might be weaker, but as that shot's progressed and continued, gone from 32 to 40 grams, it's constantly pulling solids out with it. Here, we've got 3.68 grams. Not a massive difference, you might think. It's a fraction of a gram. Sure, it's 0.2 grams, about. But that all contributes to flavor. And the interesting thing is, you know, yes, this has less water in it. But to make up the total volume of the cappuccino, this one has more water in it because you need more milk to fill the cup appropriately. Here, the shot may be longer, but you need less water, less milk to fill the cup because your espresso's filled it more. That means, if you do the maths, because we love to do maths, in this drink, we've got about 100 grams of milk added to 32 grams of espresso. And here, we've got 40 grams of espresso added to 92 grams of milk. So, eight grams has been swapped, if you want, from milk to water in this thing. That means, as a total thing, you can calculate out the strength of the final drink. The last of the nerdy bits, I promise. But the final drink strength, going all the way back to the original thing I put down on the table, that was 2.62% strength. So nerdy. This drink, made with the weaker espresso, was 2.7% in strength. It's confusing, but this has more extraction, this has more solids in the final drink, and less milk that compensates for that. They have almost identical amounts of milk fat in them. It's like 3.3 to three grams, so nothing particularly interesting. In terms of milk proteins and sugars, again, maybe half a gram difference. They're basically the same. Now, to just kind of argue with myself again, or argue this point out, try a thing. If you make milk drinks at home, just for a week, before you pour your milk, put the cup on a scale, tear it out, and see how much milk you add. Just the way that you steam, the way that you pour, you will see much bigger variance in the kind of strength of your milk drinks, coming from the variance in how you steam the milk, how much foam is in it, how much you've poured, than you'd get from small changes in how you extract your espresso. Right, so arguing about this 6.5% increase in strength from pulling a longer shot, doesn't really make sense, because you could just make it 10% stronger by adding more air to your milk drink, or just pouring less milk. So, these incremental improvements in strength, that's not really the point. The point, actually, is something else that I want to get into. Now, before I do that, because this video has a sponsor, and we haven't done it for a while, I think we should just do a little coffee giveaway. So, if you want to enter, anyone in the world watching this can enter. We're going to give away 25 bags of something delicious that you can make espresso and milk drinks with. And if, you know, we can send it to you, wherever you are in the world, then you are eligible to enter. That's it. Click the link in the description down below, and there'll be a little contest link. Quick aside, ignore any comment that ever looks like me telling me you've won. That's not how this works. They're usually scams. Anyway, we just want to give away some coffee, spread some love, spread some practice coffee, in case you want to do some experiments and improve your milk drinks. But now, though, there's a short ad for this video's sponsor, which is Surfshark. Surfshark is a fast, easy-to-use VPN service that lets you use an unlimited number of devices logged into your account. Now, a VPN is very useful these days. Firstly, it might let you appear as if your computer or your phone is in a different country, but it also adds a much-deserved layer of privacy to your online activity. Why might this be useful? Well, I was recently trying to buy something on a US website, and the website just wouldn't load for me because it thought I was outside of the US. Surfshark to the rescue. I could go on, shop for what I wanted to, and move along. Now, you may not be shopping online. You might be, say, watching a streaming service, and you want to use Surfshark to unlock content that might be geo-restricted. But if you are shopping online, Surfshark is extra useful there too, because often prices are geo-locked. So if you appear to be in a different country, you may be offered a better price. Now, alongside the VPN service, Surfshark offer a couple more products, my favorite of which is Surfshark Alert. If your email shows up in a database of hacks, if your social security number gets leaked, if your bank details, your car details get leaked, you will be notified, which keeps you safe online. If you want to give Surfshark a try, then use the link down below and you can get four extra months for free. And if you're not happy, there is a full 30-day money-back guarantee. Thank you to Surfshark for sponsoring this video. You spend your hard-earned money on specialty coffee. And while I think it's great value for money, it's not cheap. And anytime I hear someone say, pull shorter shots for a better drink, a little alarm goes off in my brain. Because that's basically advice telling you to pay good money for good flavor and then throw some of it in the bin. When you pull shorter shots, you will extract less flavor. You're leaving some good stuff behind. And because the concentration and the strength of the espresso doesn't really matter in a drink where it will be diluted so much, you don't need to worry about the concentration of flavor. You need to worry about the total amount of flavor and the quality of flavor. Pulling shorter shots is harder. You're more likely to grind finer, which will often lead to channeling and uneven shots and reduce your quality there. And you just don't have enough water in shorter shots with certainly lighter or kind of medium style roasts to get a really good extraction. If you're not chasing texture in your espresso, because it's going into a milk drink, you can just use more water to get more flavor and get more value for money. This means you could use just less coffee and pull a longer shot, right? You could go from 18 grams down to 16 grams and probably get something comparable in terms of total solids in that final cup by pushing it out a little bit more. And I'm curious actually, because I don't think I've ever done the taste test. I'm going to do it now as a little blind tasting. I think the best tasting espresso makes the best tasting milk drink. And shorter shots don't make the best tasting shots. They often taste a little sour. Milk will clean that up. There's sugar there to kind of buffer that out. There might be a little unevenly extracted. There might be some added bitterness. Milk will take that out. Milk's very good at kind of buffering out negative flavors and letting you get away with it. But can I tell the difference? Does a longer, more extracted shot that I think would taste better as an espresso, but weaker potentially, does that taste better in milk? Can I even spot the difference if the final concentrations are basically the same? So here's the test. These three drinks are all the same strength. Two are made from shorter shots from 18 grams. One is made from 16 grams. So I saved myself two grams potentially over the course of a year. That's some savings. Can I tell the difference? Is it obvious which one is the longer shot? Does it taste better? Does it taste worse? Should we be pulling shorter shots from a taste perspective or longer ones? Well, here's the deal. This is whole milk. I don't usually drink whole milk. I don't usually drink milk, but you know, for science, that's squashing a lot of the coffee flavor and nuance. And so while the espressos would taste quite notably different because it's the same strength of final drink, on first sips, I'm getting free strength here by using less coffee and pulling the shot better. I can't immediately tell the difference between these, which means that you could get away with a 16 gram shot pulled longer or in the case of Italy for decades now, a 14 gram shot pulled longer and get plenty of coffee flavor even though your espresso might seem a little bit weak. I'll try again. So there's no slurps. There's no slurps. You're happily sad. I honestly, I'm not sure. I'm surprised at this test. If I had to pick one, it might be you, but I don't feel like this is a win for whatever this is. So it's the 16 grams. I actually liked it more. Yeah, that was my favorite. Just a little bit cleaner and sweeter if I had to go right into the nitty gritty, but not a big difference. Really not, which is interesting. I mean, that's part of the nature of milk and that's part of the nature of extraction, flavor, strength, all of those things. My point ultimately, you're spending your good hard-earned cash on specialty coffee, I hope. And I want you to keep doing that and I want it to be good value for money for you. So don't chase strength in your espresso to make stronger milk drinks. Chase quality and quantity of flavor in total. That's the thing to worry about. But now I want to hear from you down in the comments below. Will this change the way you'll make some milk drinks? I'd really love some of you to try it and experiment and see how you feel about the flavor and then come back and tell us down in the comments below. Share your experiences. Have you been pulling shorter shots? Will this convince you to try a longer, weaker espresso for more coffee flavor? I'd love to hear your thoughts, your feedbacks, your ideas, all of that good stuff down in the comments below. But for now, I will say thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a great day.