What Are Soup Shots?
Be honest, when you first came across this article, you thought you were about to read about soup. While we love accessing our inner George Costanza by shifting into soup mode this winter, we're talking about soup shots—something entirely different. At first glance, soup shots sounds like the kind of concept you'd find in a gentrified downtown café that also sells hand-thrown ceramics and $15 bisque cups. But no, this trend has nothing to do with soup. It's a new brewing style that's been quite divisive thus far.
If you've heard of turbo shots, the faster, lower-pressure take on espresso, then soup shots are their more unhinged cousin. Think: coarser grounds, almost no pressure, and a cup that might make you question whether it's espresso at all. But stay with us, because once you taste one, it starts to make a surprising kind of sense.
What Is a Soup Shot?
The method was born on manual lever machines, and it's as much an experiment in restraint as it is in extraction. Recipes vary, but most fall around a 1:3 ratio or higher, pulled in 25 seconds or less, at no more than 2 bars of pressure.
Pulling one on a manual brewer like the Flair Pro 2 feels wrong at first. There's no resistance, no pressure spike, no familiar ritual of a slow ramp-up and a thick syrupy flow of crema.
Soup shots are characterized by their soupy nature; they have a thin body, almost tea-like, compared to a classic espresso, but they're also bright, aromatic, and well-balanced. The mouthfeel sits somewhere between espresso and pour-over, with clarity and sweetness that flatter lighter roasts. Because the method is so forgiving and resists channeling, it's also remarkably consistent as well.
Can You Pull One on an Espresso Machine?
Soup shots were designed for manual levers, but that doesn't mean your dual-boiler setup is out of the game. If your machine has flow control, you can get remarkably close. There are, of course, challenges. You lose the tactile feedback of a lever, and you're mostly flying blind while the group head fills. But with a few clever tweaks, it's doable.
A puck screen helps minimize headspace and keep the puck tidy during the slow fill. A shot mirror is equally handy, allowing you to keep an eye on both the bottom of the basket and your pressure gauge, thereby sparing you the espresso squat workout of early attempts.
Using a Lelit Bianca paired with a Mazzer Philos, a 20-gram dose and a 60-gram yield in 25 seconds yielded exactly what we were after: a silky, expressive cup that allowed a light-roasted Geisha from Wallflower Coffee to shine.
Should You Try It?
Yes! If you're someone who can't resist a new espresso rabbit hole, absolutely. Could you make a pour-over instead? Sure. But there's something deeply satisfying about using your espresso machine to create something so un-espresso-like, and still delicious.
Soup shots won't replace your morning cappuccino, but they might expand your idea of what espresso can be. They're easy to dial in, forgiving with grind size, and they make light roasted coffees sing. And if nothing else, they'll make you raise an eyebrow, take a sip, and say, huh.