TL;DR: Most Americanos are bitter because of three things — water from the steam boiler, the crema sitting on top, and a dilution ratio nobody actually thinks about. Steam fresh cold water to about 65–70°C, brew your espresso onto it, skim the crema with a teaspoon, and aim for roughly a 1:3 dilution. For iced, ditch the traditional iced Americano entirely and make an aerocano. James Hoffmann recently put out a video on this and most of his core moves are right — here's the full breakdown plus what I'd add as a roaster.
I've been thinking about Americanos for a week straight, which is not a sentence I expected to write. James Hoffmann put out a video on the Americano recently and it landed in a sore spot — because the Americano is genuinely a drink that almost nobody, including a lot of specialty coffee in Toronto cafés, actually thinks about with any care. I've pulled enough Americanos as a roaster to recognize that frustrating café moment exactly. You order a filter and the barista offers an Americano like it's the same thing. It isn't. They're different drinks. But when an Americano is all you've got, there's no reason it should taste like a slightly tired punishment.
A bit of context first. The story you usually hear is that American GIs in Italy during WWII wanted weaker coffee, so the Italians watered down espresso for them, and there's the Americano. James points out the timeline issue with this — Achille Gaggia's spring-lever espresso machine, the one that gives us modern pressurized espresso with crema, didn't appear until 1948. Pre-1948 espresso was a steam-pressure drink, much closer to a fast filter coffee than the concentrated shot we know today. The GI story doesn't really hold up. The Americano is more likely a 1950s drink, a response to American filter coffee culture rather than wartime rationing. That history matters because it tells you what the drink is supposed to be: a coffee that fills the role filter coffee fills — long, drinkable, sippable over twenty minutes — but built from an espresso shot because that's the only extraction method available on a busy bar.
The problem is that espresso and filter want different things. Espresso wants a darker roast, a fine grind, and a small amount of water doing aggressive work under pressure. Filter wants a lighter roast and gentle saturation over time. When you build an Americano you're asking espresso to behave like filter, and there's a reasonable amount of compromise baked into that. So the question isn't really "how do I make a great Americano." It's "how do I get an espresso machine to produce something that drinks like good filter coffee."
Now, where most Americanos actually go wrong, in roughly the order of how easy they are to fix.
The first one is the water, and almost no café does this. If you have a commercial espresso machine, or even a prosumer dual-boiler, the hot water that comes out of the spout typically comes from the steam boiler. Steam boilers run above 100°C to keep steam pressure up, and the water inside is constantly evaporating off as steam. The minerals don't evaporate — they stay behind and concentrate. Over the course of a service day the water in that boiler gets progressively harder, more mineralized, and frankly stale. Even if your incoming water is great, the water sitting in the steam boiler isn't the same water anymore. It tastes flat. It tastes a bit metallic. It carries scale potential. Brewing an espresso onto that water and then drinking it tells your palate everything you don't want it to know.
James suggests steaming fresh cold water with the steam wand to bring it up to drinking temperature — about 65–70°C — and then brewing the espresso on top of that. I was skeptical the first time I heard the suggestion, but we tested it side-by-side and the difference is genuinely larger than you'd expect. The drink reads as smoother, sweeter, less harsh on the finish. The bitterness drops noticeably. If you're at home with a single-boiler machine, just boil a kettle, let it sit for thirty seconds to drop a few degrees off boiling, and use that. Or, if you've got steam capacity, steam a small jug of cold filtered water to around 65°C and pour an espresso onto it. Either is dramatically better than pulling water out of a hot reservoir that's been sitting there.
What's actually going on? James does a fun experiment in the video where he puts an Americano in a chamber vacuum sealer to pull out as much dissolved gas as possible, hypothesizing that maybe the freshly-steamed water is better because of dissolved gases — and if so, removing gases entirely should make it even better. The result was the opposite. Vacuum-degassed Americano was noticeably worse than the control. That's actually consistent with a dissolved-oxygen hypothesis, not against it. When you steam water at 65°C you're whipping air into it via the agitation of the steam wand, which dissolves fresh O2 into the liquid. When you boil water in a kettle, oxygen solubility drops sharply with temperature, so most of the dissolved O2 gets driven off. When you pull a vacuum, you remove pretty much everything. Steamed water has more dissolved oxygen than kettle water, which has more than vacuum-degassed water — and that's exactly the order of preference James found. There's reasonable beer and water industry research showing dissolved oxygen affects perceived flavor, often in ways drinkers describe as "freshness" or "vibrancy." Whether that's exactly what's happening in coffee, I don't know. The practical takeaway is unambiguous: steam your water if you can.
Then there's the crema, and I know — I know. Crema looks beautiful. It's the thing that makes espresso visually different from filter. People take photos of it. Baristas judge their shots by it. There's an entire visual mythology built around it. It also tastes bad in an Americano, and James is absolutely right to keep saying so even though it makes people angry. Crema is, mechanically, a foam stabilized by lipids, melanoidins (those brown Maillard reaction products from roasting), and proteins, with carbon dioxide trapped inside. The CO2 came out of solution after pressure dropped — water under nine bars can hold more dissolved CO2 than water at atmospheric pressure, so when the espresso leaves the puck the gas comes out and forms foam. Mixed into that foam are very fine coffee particles, the sub-100-micron fines that escape through the basket holes. Those fines are essentially miniature pieces of ground coffee, and ground coffee is bitter. If you've ever accidentally chewed a coffee bean you know exactly what I mean.
In an espresso the crema disappears in thirty seconds. You drink the shot, you taste the texture and the body, the bitterness gets masked by the strength, you move on. In an Americano the drink lasts fifteen minutes. The crema sits there. Every sip drags those bitter fines across your palate. So skim it. Use a teaspoon, tilt the cup, drag the crema to one side, lift it off and dump it. Takes ten seconds. The drink underneath will be substantially less bitter, more articulate in flavor, and noticeably sweeter on the finish. If you're at a café and the Americano comes with crema, ask for a teaspoon and skim it yourself. Nobody minds.
The next thing nobody talks about — and James doesn't really dig into this in the video — is the dilution ratio. When you make an Americano you're choosing a dilution ratio, and the choice matters more than people pretend. James in the video uses about 40 grams of espresso into 80 grams of water, which is a 1:2 dilution, total drink around 120 grams. That's on the strong end. Most cafés serve Americanos at roughly that ratio because the cup is six ounces and you can't really fit more. For my taste, particularly with lighter roasts, I prefer a longer dilution — closer to 1:3 or even 1:4. So 40 grams of espresso into 120–160 grams of water, finishing somewhere around 8–12 ounces total. The drink reads more like filter coffee, the bitterness drops further, and lighter roasted coffee and espresso beans in particular have room to express their acidity and origin character without feeling concentrated and harsh. If you're making this at home, play with it. Brew your usual espresso. Don't pre-commit to a cup size. Add water until the drink tastes like something you actually want to drink.
The other thing this means is that the water itself — the dilution water — needs to be reasonable. Specialty Coffee Association recommendations are around 50–175 ppm total dissolved solids and 40–75 ppm hardness for brewing water. If you're doing 1:3 or 1:4 dilution, three quarters of your final drink is dilution water. Cheap chlorinated tap water will absolutely show up in the cup. Filtered water — Brita or a reverse osmosis with proper remineralization — makes a real difference.
And here's the part James only gestures at, which as a roaster is the conversation I find most useful. Roast level changes the entire game. Lighter roasts and darker roasts behave like genuinely different products in an Americano. A traditional Italian-style espresso roast — the kind of dark, fully-developed bean with a glossy oil sheen — is roasted specifically to extract well in 25 seconds with a small volume of water at nine bars. The cell structure is more degraded, soluble compounds release readily, you can pull a balanced shot quickly. Diluted into an Americano, the drink is bittersweet, chocolatey, low in acidity, and reads as familiar coffee. This is the classic Italian-style Americano. It works.
A specialty light roast — the kind of bright, juicy single origin you'd brew on a V60 — is a different beast. The bean is denser, the cell structure is less broken down, and the soluble material extracts more reluctantly. Pulling a 25-second espresso shot from a light roast often under-extracts unless you really know what you're doing with grind size, dose, and temperature. Diluted into an Americano without care, you get something thin, sour, and disappointing.
The way to handle this is to extend the espresso. James talks about this at the end of his video and it's the move I'd push hardest if you're trying to make a filter-style cup from an espresso machine. Don't pull a 1:2 ratio shot. Pull a 1:4 — so 18 grams in, 72 grams of liquid out. Coarsen the grind, let the shot run faster, accept that the extraction is more like a long pour-over than a traditional shot. Then add hot water to dilute further to drinking strength. This is essentially how the Decent espresso community brews "filter-style" espresso, and it's how I'd approach any of the single-origin coffee beans we roast on an espresso machine if I weren't doing pour-over. Practically: if you're working with a medium roast — Brazilian Naturals, Colombian washed lots, that kind of thing — a normal 1:2 shot pulled and diluted 1:3 makes a beautiful Americano. If you're working with something brighter and more delicate, extend the shot.
One thing worth flagging here. None of this works if you're not using fresh roasted coffee beans. There's a window — roughly 7 to 21 days off-roast for medium roasts, a bit shorter for darker, a bit longer for lighter — where the coffee is properly degassed but not yet stale. Outside that window the espresso pulls weird, the crema is either nonexistent or grotesquely large, and the diluted Americano reflects all of that. For Americanos specifically, mid-window beans behave best.
When you want it iced
The traditional iced Americano is, in my opinion, the worst commercially-served coffee drink in widespread circulation. Hot espresso poured over ice with cold water is bitter, harsh, and structurally unpleasant. The thermal shock destroys aromatics, the bitterness has nowhere to hide, and the dilution is impossible to control because the ice keeps melting.
The fix has been out there for a few years now and it's called the aerocano. The mechanics are stupid simple. Build a glass with about 85 grams of ice and 65 grams of cold water. Steam that mixture for about ten seconds — the steam melts the ice into the cold water while whipping the whole thing into a microfoam, and crucially the temperature stays low because of the ice's heat capacity. Pull a double espresso, skim the crema, and add it on top.
What you get looks and drinks like a nitro cold brew — silky, foamy, properly cold, and the foam buffers the bitterness in a way that traditional iced Americano doesn't. When we tested this against a traditional iced Americano back-to-back, the difference was night and day. It's now even on Starbucks' menu in Korea, which is usually a sign that a specialty technique has fully broken into the mainstream. If you're really sensitive to bitter, a single drop of saline solution (a 20% sodium chloride solution in water) suppresses bitter perception via the standard sodium-bitterness antagonism. One drop. Don't make it salty.
A few smaller things worth mentioning while we're here. Pre-warm your cup — cold ceramic pulls heat out of the drink fast and shifts the perceived flavor, so rinse with the hot water you're about to use. Brew espresso onto water, not water onto espresso — adding water on top of an extracted espresso disrupts the crema and throws fines into suspension; building the drink the other way keeps the crema as a clean cap you can skim. Dial in your espresso for the espresso, not the Americano — don't try to compensate for the Americano's bitterness by deliberately under-extracting your shot. Pull a balanced espresso, then fix the bitterness through everything above. Under-extracted espresso just makes a sour, thin Americano. And drink it within five minutes. Hot Americanos don't hold up. The aromatic volatiles dissipate, the temperature drops to a wrong middle, and what was a complex drink becomes flat sugar water. Not a hill to die on, but worth knowing.
For what it's worth, since people ask: among the Canadian coffee brands roasting locally, the kind of coffees I'd reach for on an Americano are medium-roast naturals and washed lots from Latin America and Africa. They've got enough body to survive dilution, enough sweetness to balance the dilution-unmasked bitterness, and enough origin character to be interesting at a longer ratio. The Highland Elixir from PNG Sigri Plantation that we roast as a wholesale lot makes a particularly clean Americano — that estate's coffees have a kind of structured chocolate-and-stone-fruit profile that handles dilution gracefully. If you're a RoastPlan subscriber and you mostly drink Americanos, ask for a medium roast on a coffee with structure rather than a delicate light roast. The light roasts are gorgeous on filter, but they need a different game plan on espresso.
If you want the moving-picture version of all of this, James Hoffmann's video is genuinely worth watching — it's the source for the steamed-water and vacuum-chamber experiments and is a very entertaining 25 minutes regardless. The longer-shot-for-light-roasts approach is the one I'd push hardest, and it's where the difference between a mediocre Americano and a really good one tends to live for me.
The Americano's identity problem isn't going away. Filter coffee will always be the better drink for what filter coffee does. But on a busy café bar, in an office kitchen, or at home with an espresso machine and no V60, an Americano done well is a perfectly excellent coffee. It just needs someone to actually think about it for ten minutes.
Most cafés don't. Now you do.
