Pu’er Coffee

 When people talk about coffee culture, Italy inevitably comes up. To me, Italy has always felt like a somewhat special place—and that sense of “specialness” largely comes from its almost obsessive devotion to food traditions, or rather, an uncompromising loyalty to them. I once came across a discussion on Quora about this very topic, and one highly upvoted response perfectly captured the Italian mindset when it comes to protecting tradition and cuisine. In Italy, the highest compliment you can give a dish isn’t “This tastes like something from a fine-dining restaurant,” but rather, “This tastes like my mom made it.” Yes—Italians are deeply committed to what they call “the taste of mamma,” a form of emotional loyalty rooted in culture and memory. So when it comes to adding hot water to espresso to make an Americano, many Italians see it the same way you might react to someone putting durian or pineapple on a pizza: simply unbearable. It’s viewed as a kind of cultural sacrilege. In...

 This question is something I’ve noticed quite frequently over the past year while café hopping. Of course, it’s not a new topic for me—I’ve already touched on it multiple times in previous articles. Personally, I’ve encountered it so often that I’ve almost become “desensitized” to the idea of filtering crema from an Americano. But if we take a more rational step back, the reason many cafés now promote over-extraction–style Americanos is fairly clear: they’re chasing a cleaner, more stable, and smoother mouthfeel, while trying to avoid unpleasant flavors. From my point of view, over-extraction–based Americanos and traditional “espresso + water” Americanos follow fundamentally different extraction and brewing logics. In that context, removing the crema can be a 1 + 1 > 2 kind of optimization. However, if it’s just a standard espresso shot that’s brewed normally, then filtered for crema, and only afterward diluted with water, I personally feel it would be better to leave the cr...