title_body: Why did espresso never catch on as a mainstream drink in the US?
upvoted_answer: Coffee spread throughout Europe in the 17th and 18th C and was brought over to the United States by colonialists and immigrants. Coffee was already a fixture here by the time espresso was invented in the early 20th C.
  
  
    Coffee arrived in Italy in the 17th century.It was made in the Turkish manner andconsumed in elite coffee houses such as Florian in Venice.Cappuccino was madeby adding the froth from warm milk to the coffee.However it was only in 1905that the first espresso machine entered into production.
    https://www.academia.edu/379110/The_Cappuccino_Conquests._The_Transnational_History_of_Italian_Coffee_2007_
  
  
  Espresso did not become a staple of Italian or European culture until after WWII. 
  
  
    By the late 1950s, most Italians consumed coffee at home, in the traditional moka pot—first built by engineer Alfonso Bialetti in 1933, and now an icon of Italian design worldwide, as Morris explains in his 2008 essay “A History of Espresso in Italy and the World.” But there were exceptions. A young Calvino was a regular customer at Caffè Talmone, a café in Turin where he met with other intellectuals to discuss books and politics. There, he drank Italian espresso with a layer of foam on top, the result of a patent registered by bar owner Achille Gaggia in 1947.
    https://qz.com/992879/the-curious-tale-of-how-italy-became-the-world-capital-of-coffee/
  
  
  So why did espresso come to dominate European culture after WWII and not the US? Why would any fad or variety necessarily come to dominate the world? Why would a new variety necessarily overcome tradition?  For one thing - espressos require specialty machines that were extremely expensive. Until recently it was not something that would be found in an ordinary kitchen whether in Italy or the United States.