Public manifesto Version 1.0 Free to copy, translate and hang on a wall
Coffee has rules.
Anybody can pour a brown liquid and charge for it. This is the shortest possible list of what the world owes a cup — and what you are allowed to refuse.
If they ask for an espresso, it must be an espresso. Not a long shot drowning in a soup bowl. A name is a contract.
Why this exists
Coffee is one of the most traded things we drink and one of the most reliably ruined. Somewhere between a farm that is paid too little and a machine nobody has cleaned since Tuesday, the cup quietly stops being coffee and becomes a habit with a price tag.
This manifesto is not about taste. Taste is yours: drink it black, drink it with three sugars, drink it filtered, drink it cold. It is about honesty — that what arrives matches what was ordered, that fresh means fresh, that clean means clean, and that everybody along the chain actually gets paid.
Ten rules. No membership, no fee, no purity test, no certificate to buy. Take them, argue with them, translate them, print them, hang them behind your counter.
The ten rules
Tick the ones you already keep. Nobody is watching — the score never leaves your browser.
Start somewhere.
Tick a rule when your bar, your kitchen or your office already keeps it.
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01If it is called espresso, it must be an espresso.
About 25 ml in the cup, about 25 seconds, real crema, from around 7 grams of fresh coffee. Pull it longer and it is a lungo. Pull it shorter and it is a ristretto. All three are wonderful, and all three already have names. Selling the famous name for the cheap version is the original sin.
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02Freshness has a date. Print it.
A roast date on the bag, not a two-year expiry. Coffee is at its best from roughly one week to roughly two months after roasting. “Best before 2028” is an elegant way of saying nothing at all.
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03Grind to order.
Ground coffee loses most of its aromatics in minutes. Grinding the whole day at seven in the morning is not efficiency, it is a decision to serve stale coffee for the next nine hours — taken once, and paid for by every customer after the first.
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04Water is the other 98%.
A cup is almost entirely water. Filter it, keep it somewhere around 75–150 ppm of dissolved minerals, and descale on a calendar rather than on a hunch. Nobody ever blames the water. It is very often the water.
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05Dark is not strong. Burnt is not intense.
Black, oily beans are damaged goods sold as character. Strength comes from dose and extraction; bitterness is a mistake wearing a costume. Roast towards sweetness, not towards smoke — and stop calling the smoke “body”.
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06Clean the machine. Every single day.
Backflush the group, scrub the basket, brush the burrs, and wipe the steam wand after every use. Rancid coffee oil is a flavour with a name, and the name is not caring. No recipe survives a dirty machine.
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07Steam the milk. Do not boil it.
Stop at 55–65 °C. Glossy microfoam, no cathedral of bubbles, and never re-steam. Past 70 °C the milk tastes of scalded protein and politely erases everything underneath it, including the coffee you paid for.
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08The cup is part of the recipe.
Preheated, thick-walled, and sized for the drink actually ordered. A cold cup steals ten degrees on contact. A 300 ml mug turns an espresso into a rumour about an espresso.
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09Somebody grew this. Pay them.
A price too low to pay a farm is not a bargain; it is a debt that somebody else settles, usually the person who picked it. Ask your roaster what they paid and to whom. If they cannot answer, that is the answer.
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10Say what is in the cup.
Origin, roast date, method — and the price per kilo if you are feeling brave. Anonymity is where mediocrity goes to live comfortably. Good coffee has nothing to hide and, given half a chance, will not shut up about itself.
Article 11 — The right to refuse
Bad coffee may be sent back. Politely, without theatre, without apology and without a lecture. A rule nobody can enforce is not a rule: this is the one that gives the other ten teeth.
Is it an espresso?
Move the sliders to whatever comes out of your machine. The bands below are the Italian reference standard — a starting point, not a religion. The numbers may move. The name may not.
Your shot
drag anything
EspressoReference: Istituto Nazionale Espresso Italiano. A Nordic roaster, a third-wave bar or your own house recipe can sit happily outside these bands and still be excellent — the rule is not “obey the numbers”, the rule is call it what it is.
What we refuse
Not snobbery. Just nine things that are done every day, on purpose, by people who know better.
- An espresso served in a mugThat is a lungo with ambitions.
- Coffee kept on a hotplate “so it stays hot”Coffee is not soup.
- Beans roasted last season, sold as “classic”Classic is not a synonym for old.
- A grinder still full of yesterdayYour first three customers are drinking Tuesday.
- Milk screamed to 80 °C and re-steamed twiceYou can smell that from the door.
- “Strong” used as a polite word for burntStrength is dose. Burnt is a mistake.
- Limescale thick enough to tasteAt that point you are serving the kettle.
- A price that only works because someone upstream was not paidCheap coffee is always paid for by somebody.
- Sugar used as a repair instead of a choiceSugar is allowed. Hiding behind it is not.
Adopt the rules
There is nothing to sign up for and nobody to pay. The only way this becomes a standard is if enough people simply behave as though it already is one.