Schümli: The Swiss Favourite Coffee Nobody Calls Specialty

Schümli: The Swiss Favourite Coffee Nobody Calls Specialty

If you press a button on a Swiss bean-to-cup machine and a golden-brown layer of foam appears on top of your cup, you have a Schümli in front of you. The word comes from Swiss German Schum, meaning foam, with the diminutive suffix li. Literally: little foam. On café menus you mostly read Café Crème, on the supermarket shelf at Migros it is labelled Schümli, in a Ticino bar you might just hear crema. It is always the same drink.

What makes a Schümli

A Schümli sits between filter coffee and espresso. You brew it under higher pressure than filter coffee, around nine bar like espresso, but with much more water. From roughly 12 to 14 grams of beans you get 80 to 120 millilitres of coffee in the cup. For comparison: an espresso is 25 to 30 millilitres, a classic filter coffee 200 to 250. The Schümli is right in the middle. Stronger and more intense than filter coffee, milder and longer than espresso, with that signature crema on top.

How the Schümli was born

The story starts in Rüti, in the canton of Zurich, in the early 1980s. The technician Arthur Schmed worked at the company Solis and was tinkering with a machine that combined espresso pressure and a built-in grinder in a household format. Until then this kind of machine only existed in restaurants and bars. In 1985 Solis presented the first fully automatic coffee machine for home use at the Muba trade fair in Basel. It was a sensation. Suddenly every Swiss household could press a button and pull a coffee with crema from freshly ground beans under pressure.

There was just one problem: Italian espresso beans were often too fine, too intense, too oily for these machines. Filter coffee blends produced no crema at all. Swiss roasters responded and developed a blend tailored exactly to the new automatic machines: Schümli. A slightly lighter roast than Italian espresso, often with a small portion of Robusta for stable crema, ground so that under pressure it produces a beautiful golden-brown layer. Out of the machine and the matching bean came what is today the Swiss standard cup of coffee.

Schümli, Café Crème and Caffè Lungo

The names get a bit confusing. On a proper menu you rarely see Schümli. There you read Café Crème, the official label for exactly this drink. Schümli is the affectionate everyday version. In Italy this drink doesn't really exist. The slightly extended espresso there is called Caffè Lungo, but it is shorter and more concentrated than a Schümli. So order a Café Crème in Bellinzona and you get roughly what you'd call Schümli in Zurich, while in Ticino itself it is just crema or caffè in tazza grande.

Why specialty coffee and Schümli often clash

The Schümli is a bean-to-cup coffee. Bean-to-cup machines are not the favourite tool of the specialty scene. The grinders are usually conical and not very precise, the pressure can hardly be adjusted, and the brewing process is standardised. Specialty beans with delicate flavours like bergamot, jasmine or apricot often disappear in a bean-to-cup cup. To get a working Schümli, you need a blend with body, sweetness and stable crema. For decades that meant Robusta plus dark-roasted Arabica.

In recent years Swiss specialty roasters have started to change the game. They develop espresso and crème blends made from pure specialty Arabica beans, often with a medium roast that performs surprisingly well in automatic machines. The crema is a little lighter, a little thinner, but the coffee actually tastes of something. Chocolate, caramel, sometimes berry or nut. That's the next generation of Schümli.

How to pull a good Schümli

If you have a bean-to-cup machine at home, the most important variables are the bean and the grind. A fresh specialty crème blend almost always beats a generic supermarket one. Look for a roast date no older than six weeks. Adjust the grind so that brewing a small Schümli takes between 25 and 35 seconds. If it runs too fast, grind finer. If it just drips, grind coarser. Clean the brewing unit regularly, otherwise every coffee tastes slightly rancid no matter how good the bean.

If you don't own a bean-to-cup machine, you can produce something close to a Schümli with a portafilter. Pull a double espresso from around 18 grams of coffee and fill the cup with about 60 millilitres. The result is closer to an Italian Lungo, but in the same flavour family. A classic pour over never gives you a Schümli because there is no crema.

What Schümli and specialty coffee have in common

The Schümli is a piece of Swiss daily life. It is in Migros, in Coop, in almost every office and in every other living room. Specialty coffee, on the other hand, is about attention, origin, time. At first glance they look like two different worlds. But they don't have to exclude each other. A good Swiss roaster who roasts for automatic machines can work just as transparently as a filter-focused specialty roaster. The beans come from the same farmers; only the roast profile is tuned differently.

On Röstpost you'll find crema and espresso blends from Swiss specialty roasters that also work in a bean-to-cup machine. So if you love your Schümli but would also like to know who roasted the bean and where it came from, start there. You'll be surprised how much flavour can hide under a golden crema layer when the bean is right.