It turns out coffee is a lot like literature. You've got your greasy spoon swill—diner joe, unlimited refills, the kind of coffee you find in a hospital cafeteria: thin, scalding stuff dispensed from industrial urns or kept dangerously hot in glass pots atop twin warmers, the decaf denoted by an orange spout and handle. That's your tabloid journalism, your airport best-sellers, the formulaic and forgettable work of hacks.

Then there's French press brews and pour-overs where quality beans, ostensibly of one's own choosing, can be ground fresh to produce a cup or two of more authentic coffee, coffee that actually resembles its aroma. Now you're reading Hemingway, maybe a Nick Adams short story like "Big Two-Hearted River" or one of Papa's novels with prose that's "clean and honest and affirms courage and grace under pressure."

That's some swell writing and damned good coffee. But where do you go from there?

Espresso. Espresso is poetry, the most concentrated, distilled form of the language. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote: "Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in the best order." Emily Dickinson famously wrote: "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." Get that girl a ristretto!

I remember my first espresso. It was in 1991 when I was an infantry officer at Schofield Barracks. I was at an Italian restaurant I frequented called Bravo in Pearl City, Hawaii, just up the road from Pearl Harbor. (They must be doing something right because they're still going strong.) Bravo serves delicious trattoria-style fare and the thought of their tomato sauce ladled over a plate of fusilli still makes me salivate. They also have real-deal New York cheesecake. Now, for a New Yorker to have been exiled on Oahu wasn't exactly a life-sentence in a Siberian Gulag, but sometimes I hankered for a taste of home. Decent Italian food is easy enough to find, but cheesecake is a Gotham specialty.

So one evening, my waiter suggested I wash down their velvety rich cheesecake with an espresso. It was an epiphany! Prior to that, coffee had always been a disappointment. As a kid I occasionally snuck a sip of my parents' java and wondered why the hell they'd drink such a bitter brew. It always smelled enticing as the percolator dripped and bubbled, but the taste never lived up to the perfume. Then I had that espresso. Finally, a coffee that actually tasted like . . . coffee! It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

One immediately notices the difference in texture: espresso, when properly made, has viscosity. It's dense. The pleasing crema atop the surface, a frothy suede-colored foam, results from the fats and oils in the roasted coffee bean. I'm of the school that there's a correlation between good crema and good espresso.

Once you know what good espresso tastes like you're likely to be often disappointed. Pulling a shot, as they say in the trade, involves many variables: the coffee beans themselves; how the beans are roasted; how they're ground; and the skill of the barista, particularly filling and tamping that fine powder into the basket. So many times I've received an espresso sans crema, almost always the harbinger of a mediocre shot. And how many times has my tongue been scorched by an espresso that's way too hot?

For nearly 20 years I've been making my own espresso. It will come as no surprise that the guy who listens to vinyl LPs and drives a 1967 Mustang uses an old-school rig for his twice-daily shots. My machine is a 2005 Rancilio Silvia (the tech plate underneath the spill tray specifies that the machine's name is Miss Silvia.)

The company, located just outside of Milan, was founded in 1927 by Roberto Rancilio. Miss Silvia made her debut in 1997 and a cult soon grew. Commercial-quality and practically bulletproof, my Signorina is the Sherman tank of espresso machines: simple, inexpensive, and effective. But like a record player, she's strictly analog. You can't just drop a pod in it and press "start." You have to pack and tamp the coffee and learn to temperature surf—riding the sine curve of the internal thermostat which switches the boiler on and off. An orange light tells you when the boiler is heating up; when the light goes off you can make your espresso.

Of course, the other variable is the coffee—type, roast, and grind. Standing alongside Miss Silvia is my grinder, a Mazzer Mini, in which I drop calibrated handfuls of Rocket Blend from Princeton's own Small World Coffee, 26 years young and thriving. Unlike a lot of other coffee houses not named Starbuck's, Small World actually roasts their own coffee. Their House Blend is a great all-purpose bean, but their Rocket Blend yields absolutely superb espresso with an Italian flavor profile of chocolate and amaretto notes and crema on which to float a quarter.

After some initial experimentation toggling between coarse and fine, I "dialed in" the grind for Rocket Blend on the Mazzer years ago. Like writing a poem, making great espresso is an art, but I have it down to a science. On my typical schedule, I make a shot after breakfast and another in the late afternoon, usually around four. I enjoy the beverage and I also enjoy the ritual. No doubt about it, espresso is poetry.