How to Brew: Capsule Coffee Recipes

Our goal was to produce a coffee capsule as close to the cafe experience as possible. Here are our recipes to help you achieve that at home.

Note: We recommend two different shot volumes - 25ml and 40ml. If your machine is pulling too much or too little out of each shot, check out our guide on how to reprogram your capsule machine. It’s easier than you think!

Get the size right

Capsules use much less coffee than an espresso shot from your local cafes, so the key to a great tasting brew is to keep the size in check. Small is beautiful (and tasty).

We brew our capsule coffee in three types of vessel:  

  • 60ml ceramic cup - single and double espresso 

  • 90ml glass - piccolo 

  • 160ml ceramic tulip cup - flat white and long black. 

The following recipes are quite precise, if you want to understand more about the difference between coffee flavour and strength, read our deep dive.

The recipes

Before we get started, be sure to load your machine with some beautifully filtered water.

Single Espresso

This one is easy. One Allpress Specialty Coffee Capsule brewed as a 25ml shot. It's creamy, chocolate sweet and has nice red dried fruits. It tastes as Allpress should.

Double Espresso

As above but twice. If you want a bigger coffee we recommend using two capsules. Don't push the brew button twice with one capsule or run the shot longer. This will only extract the undesirable bitter flavours and make your coffee taste horrible.

Long Black

This is where strength becomes a factor. Our perfect Long Black is our Double Espresso recipe topped up with 20 ml boiling water.

Piccolo

This is our go-to for a milky coffee. A Single Espresso topped up with 65ml of steamed milk. This ratio of coffee to milk will give you that classic cafe flavour profile. 

Flat White

We understand you want it all - a cafe-style flat white with only one capsule. We recommend brewing your shot a little longer to 40ml topped up with 120ml of perfectly steamed milk. Sweet with lots of caramel and vanilla, the coffee cuts through enough and superbly balanced.

Double Flat White

A Double Espresso topped-up with 110ml of perfectly steamed milk. Saturday morning perfection.

If you want to produce latte art quality milk we recommend the Nano Wand or the Dualit Milk Frother.