One important parameter when making a good espresso is how much you make. When I bought the machine at Cortado in Oslo (hereby highly recommended), we had a little discussion about the volume of a single espresso.

The salesman claimed that a single Italian espresso is about 35-40 ml, which I found to be too much. But I didn’t have any idea of how much less it should be. (I am referring to Italian espresso here, not northern European which is larger – especially at restaurants, or American espresso which is even larger still).

I recently had the opportunity to measure it myself during a three weeks stay at a vineyard in Tuscany (also highly recommended and possibly the subject of a future post). The answer is that an Italian espresso (or “caffée normale”) ranges from about 10ml to about 25ml, where somewhere around 25ml seems to be the normal. The measurements were made in Siena and at Chianti Autogrill on Autostrada A1.

And did I get some strange looks as I did my measurements?

You bet