Sound waves made a perfect espresso. That is the problem.
Issue 5
A new ultrasonic method out of Sydney brews espresso in three minutes with 75 percent less energy. A hundred people tasted it blind and could not tell the difference. The case it makes for specialty coffee is more complicated than it sounds.
A researcher at the University of New South Wales announced this week that his team had developed a way to brew espresso using ultrasonic sound waves instead of heat. Room-temperature water. A small metal device slotted into a standard filter basket. Under three minutes. Seventy-five percent less energy.
They ran a blind taste test with a hundred regular coffee drinkers. The verdict: indistinguishable from a normal espresso.
That is the part that stopped me.
The goal of specialty coffee was never to make something nobody could tell apart from everything else.
The efficiency case is real
The numbers are not trivial. Coffee prices in Australia are up thirty-seven percent since before the pandemic. Energy costs are a genuine operational pressure on cafes everywhere. A device that cuts heating costs by three-quarters and brews faster is a real improvement on the logistics of running a coffee shop, and dismissing it as a threat to craft would be too easy.
The concentrate potential is also interesting. Room-temperature extraction at that concentration opens distribution channels that hot-brew cannot reach. That is a different business from a specialty cafe, but it is a real one.
The benchmark is the problem
Here is what the study actually measured: whether consumers could distinguish this espresso from a normal espresso. Not from a great espresso. Not from the Streamer shot in Azabujuban or the Brown Sound cup in Tsudanuma. From a normal one.
Specialty coffee's entire argument is that normal is not where the ceiling is. Third wave was built on the premise that the distance between a bad espresso and a great one was worth caring about. The fourth wave added the room, the staff, the ritual. If you are optimising for indistinguishable from normal, you have already decided that gap does not matter.
That is a business decision. It is not a coffee one.
- Brown Sound Coffee Steep PickTsudanuma, Narashino · Chiba · Steep Index 9.0/10
A compact, carefully considered specialty cafe in Tsudanuma with latte craftsmanship that has no business being this good in a room this small. The best reason to come to Narashino.
- Streamer Coffee Company Azabujuban Steep PickAzabujuban, Minato · Tokyo · Steep Index 8.6/10
The two-time World Latte Art Champion's Azabujuban base where the exterior stops you on the street and the Streamer Latte kicks ass before you've finished deciding if it's your favourite cafe in Tokyo.
The situation pick
Brown Sound Coffee in Tsudanuma, on any morning. It is a forty-minute train ride from central Tokyo and the coffee alone makes the case that normal is not where the ceiling is. Order the espresso. The gap between that shot and a normal one is the entire argument.
On our radar
The researchers are honest about what they built: a way to make decent espresso cheaper to produce at scale. That is a different project from specialty coffee. The confusion between those two projects is where most of the discourse about coffee innovation goes wrong, and it is worth keeping the distinction clear.