Your Espresso Addiction Stems from an Ancient Ceremony
It’s hard to imagine life before espresso , but believe it or not, there was once a tired, latte-less time. The first basic prototype for an espresso machine was invented in Turin, Italy in the 1880s, though it looked more like a hot-water heater than the blinged-out coffee hotrods we see in cafés today, and for good reason—that’s basically all it was, a steam boiler designed to heat water in a closed chamber, which would also build up a reserve of pressure that a waiter or bartender could release over a bed of finely ground coffee . Those early machines, including the 1905 patent by Luigi Bezzera that modernized and streamlined the design and added more functionality for the human making the coffee (they were not known as baristas until much later), are interesting enough on their own—and we’ll briefly discuss how they work in a moment—but the really interesting thing about the history of espresso comes from tracing the story of coffee drinking all the way from Ethiopia and piecing
