Why does my coffee have no crema?

Crema is a reasonable freshness indicator and a poor quality indicator. Plenty of excellent coffee produces thin crema and plenty of mediocre coffee produces thick crema, so it is worth knowing what it is actually telling you before chasing it.

What you'll need

• Beans with a roast date
• Scales (optional)

Step by step

1. Check the roast date, not the best-before date.Best-before dates on coffee are often a year out. Crema falls away noticeably after about a month from roasting, and a bag with no roast date is usually old.
2. Confirm the beans are not pre-ground.Ground coffee loses its gas within days. Pre-ground espresso almost never produces meaningful crema.
3. Check the shot is actually extracting properly.A gushing shot produces pale, thin, quickly-collapsing crema. Fix the timing first — crema often returns on its own.
4. Look at what the beans are.Robusta produces markedly more crema than arabica, and darker roasts more than lighter. Neither means better coffee.
5. Check the machine is reaching pressure.If crema disappeared suddenly with the same beans, suspect the machine — a worn pump or a blocked shower screen — rather than the coffee.

Tips

• Very fresh beans, under about five days from roast, can produce excessive crema and an unstable shot. A week's rest usually improves both.
• Crema dissipates in under a minute. Judging it from a photograph taken later tells you nothing.

Common mistakes

• Treating crema as a quality score — It measures dissolved gas, which tracks freshness and bean type. Excellent light-roast arabica routinely produces modest crema.
• Grinding finer and finer to force crema — You end up with a choked, bitter shot. If the beans are stale, no grind setting recovers the gas.

Questions people ask