# Why your Americano might be tasting wrong

> The classic espresso-and-hot-water formula hasn't changed much in decades. A few small adjustments make a genuinely noticeable difference.

By Joey Krosch. Published 2024-12-18, updated 2026-08-17.

The Americano is one of the simplest drinks on any coffee menu, espresso
diluted with hot water, and it's barely changed in decades. That
simplicity is exactly why a few small adjustments can make a genuinely
noticeable difference. Specialty coffee figures like James Hoffmann have
spent real time picking apart what actually goes wrong with a standard
Americano, and the fixes are simple once you know what to look for.

## The temperature problem

Most café machines dispense dilution water at close to boiling, often
above 90°C. Coffee's flavour compounds are most balanced somewhere
between 60°C and 70°C, sweetness and complexity read clearly in that
range. Water any hotter and your palate starts to lose the ability to
distinguish anything beyond bitterness, the same reason scalding-hot food
tastes duller than it should.

> **A simple fix:**
> Use a separate, temperature-controlled kettle for your dilution water,
> set to around 80°C to 85°C rather than whatever comes straight out of the
> machine's hot water spout.

## Inconsistent strength

A well-balanced Americano generally sits somewhere in the 1.2% to 1.8%
total dissolved solids range, similar territory to a well-extracted filter
coffee. Most Americanos made on the fly, without measuring, land well
outside that range purely by chance, too watery or too intense depending
on how much water happened to be added.

**A reliable starting point**: a 40-gram espresso shot at roughly 8.5%
TDS, diluted with 160 grams of water, lands close to a balanced 1.7% TDS,
a straightforward 1:4 ratio you can scale up or down.

## The crema question

Crema concentrates a lot of an espresso's more bitter compounds and oils,
which is part of why some Americanos taste harsher than the espresso shot
they were built from. Pouring the espresso into hot water, rather than
water into espresso, tends to produce a cleaner-tasting result, since it
breaks up the crema layer more thoroughly as it enters the water.

## Water quality

Use filtered water for the dilution, ideally sitting in the specialty
coffee range for total hardness, roughly 50 to 175 mg/L. Water straight
from an unfiltered tap can carry mineral content or chlorine character
that genuinely interferes with how the drink tastes, independent of your
espresso quality.

## An iced variant worth trying

Shaking a fresh espresso shot hard with ice, rather than simply pouring it
over ice, changes the result meaningfully: the vigorous aeration and rapid
cooling tend to soften some of the harsher, more bitter notes compared to
a standard iced pour.

## The takeaway

None of this requires new equipment beyond a kettle you can control the
temperature on. Get the dilution temperature and ratio right, pour
thoughtfully rather than carelessly, and a drink most people treat as an
afterthought becomes something genuinely worth drinking on its own merits.