- Today, we're gonna talk
about getting the best results that you can
dialling in a bean to cup machine, a little domestic,
super automatic.
How can you get the best tasting coffees at the end of it?
These things make a particular promise.
They say, "just put water in,
just put beans in, push a button.
It's all taken care of."
But if you've bought one of these
and you've tried to put specialty coffee into them,
you might have been frustrated
because specialty coffee is kind of like the final boss
of coffee brewing.
It's generally light roast.
It's generally dense high-grown coffees
and those are more difficult to extract.
And these machines are not necessarily built
for those kind of coffees.
And so the promise of "it's easy" might have led you
to try and tweak and dial in
and become incredibly frustrated with these things.
Now, the reason I've got six
of them here is I'm working on a comparison review.
It'll be out very soon, but while they were here,
it seemed a good idea to share what I've learned
from brewing with them
and how I would recommend you approach dialling in
especially for specialty,
even though these techniques will work,
whatever coffee you are using
to give you, what I think,
can be a really delicious cup of coffee.
Let's start by talking
about why these things are kind of difficult when it comes
to brewing real espresso.
Now, the way these machines brew coffee
is actually surprisingly similar across the board,
the base kind of underlying mechanism.
If I open this up, I can show you what I mean.
(door opens)
(door shuts)
The way that these things generally work is
that you have a chamber that we're gonna grind into.
Your grinder is gonna sit right
above this here and funnel ground coffee in.
When it's hit the dose that it has specified,
it's usually a time-based grind on these things,
this little chamber will move around,
so that that puck of coffee gets pushed across
and then lifted up, let me get that there,
against the kind of brewing chamber.
So now it's in brewing mode and it's gonna pull that shot.
Now, if you've been making espresso
with a traditional machine,
you would know that it's important to prep the puck,
tamp the puck, in order to have an even extraction,
that's really fundamental to espresso.
And the problem with these machines is
that there's no real puck prep.
And so what happens is,
you typically get quite an uneven extraction
and you're gonna end up fighting that mechanism.
If you try and put a very fine grind of coffee,
as you would use for espresso,
into one of these brew groups,
generally the puck prep isn't good enough
and the water will just find a way around the coffee
and it won't extract most of the coffee properly.
So confusingly, with these things,
you actually have to go a little bit coarser.
We'll talk about dialling in the grind in just a second
in machines that let you do that.
But it's important to understand here
that we're fighting uneven extraction first and foremost,
and so grind isn't always gonna be our friend.
Getting more extraction
through grinding finer is not often the solution
to our problems.
Now this is well known in the world of espresso.
This was actually diagnosed by a sort
of scientific paper that I made a video about a while ago.
And you might have heard of turbo shots.
I'll leave a link to,
I think Lance Hedrick's video is very good.
I'll leave a link to that if you wanna know more
about turbo shots in the world of regular espresso,
but those are the kind of ideas we're gonna be applying
to these machines.
Let's start with the first of the step by steps.
In step one, you need
to work out how much coffee you're using.
So what we're gonna do is actually take out the waste tray
for the machine. (machine beeps)
And all machines have different waste trays.
This one is where the grounds end up.
So what we're gonna do, we're gonna put it on a scale,
zero it out, and then we're gonna put it back in
and we're gonna make the machine brew.
Now we don't want to weigh the wet, spent puck,
that's not actually useful.
That will be missing some coffee that will have gone
into the cup and also it'll be full of water.
So we don't know what the grounds' weight is.
We need the un-brewed weight.
So first thing, set the machine
to kind of maximum strength rating.
It'll be little bean symbols or something like that.
You want that at max to know how much coffee
is the maximum you can brew with
and then you're gonna brew a drink.
(machine whirs) And then
Just after it finishes grinding, cut the power.
This means that ground coffee will never be brewed.
When I turn the machine back on, it will go
through its reset process,
it moves the little brew chamber around
through all the positions as part of that,
thus dumping out the ground coffee, un-brewed,
into the little collection box.
(machine beeps)
And yeah indeed. So you can see here,
we've got ground coffee, un-brewed.
This thing produces about 13 grams
of ground coffee at maximum dose.
And that's good to know, that's useful to know.
Now some machines won't let you do this properly.
It's kind of annoying.
What you'll need to do there,
is actually weigh the entire brew group
and same thing,
interrupt just after grinding
and pull the brew group out again.
And you'll see it's got ground coffee
in the top and you can weigh that.
This is just a little bit easier,
but it's a really important thing
to know right at the beginning to help develop a good recipe
and to get the best out of your machine.
Know though, that across the machines I've tested so far,
doses have ranged anywhere from 8 grams to 16 grams.
So there's a big variance
and that's why it's important to measure right at the start.
Now we're gonna try and figure out our ratio.
Now this machine dose is a little heavier.
Max is about 15, 16 grams.
I'd recommend like a four to one starting ratio
with these machines.
You may change that, one way or the other,
but four to one is a good place to start.
Many machines, and this one included,
will let you choose the milliliters,
but don't always believe them.
What I would recommend doing is aiming for 60 mls,
which is what we have programmed here,
but weigh the output
because it's what's in the cup that counts.
You want that to weigh four times
the ground coffee dose weight.
(machine whirs)
So here we've got 58.5 grams, which is actually pretty good.
Really this stage is to try
and understand what the machine is actually giving you,
versus what it says it gives you.
Most of them will let you adjust the amount
of output by five mls at a time.
So you kind of wanna adjust it until you get what you want
and kind of ignore, to some extent,
what many of them say.
This one though, really pretty close, which is good.
Now you can at this stage,
give what you've got a little taste.
That's no bad thing.
It'll give you a pretty good idea
of where you are in this whole process
before you begin to make any other adjustments.
Now, even if you're not a straight espresso drinker,
taste is gonna be your guide today.
I have lots of other tools and things like that
that I can use to assess coffee.
Most people at home don't.
This is not similar to a real espresso.
It's a strong coffee with crema on top,
but it's not real kind of true espresso.
It's not strong enough.
We can't use a fine enough grind.
What we're chasing here is a feeling of balance.
There might be some acidity, but you want it to be balanced.
You want a nice clean aftertaste, no excessive bitterness,
no real obvious flaws.
It will taste strong if you don't drink espresso regularly,
but it should taste pleasant, clean, enjoyable.
This particular espresso is pretty good
but I actually think it's just a little bit under extracted.
And I know that because it's just a little bit sour.
Many people would want to reach for the grind setting
which takes us to a discussion about what you should do
about the grind setting with your machine.
Not every machine actually has a grind adjuster.
If yours doesn't, don't worry too much.
It actually makes the process simpler.
If yours does, it's generally in the bean hopper
at the back of the machine.
The range of grind settings
across different machines is kind of huge.
You might be surprised if you look at a spent puck
and see that the coffee feels very coarse,
that's pretty normal.
Some machines, the finest grind setting is still
nowhere near espresso.
And some it's actually pretty close to espresso.
You do not want a very fine grind setting.
Finer than an AeroPress just,
but not that much finer, like Moka Pot fine,
in some cases, may be too fine for some of these machines.
So, surprisingly coarse. It is what it is.
I wish they could work a little finer, they can't
and so, wherever possible,
I'd avoid using the grind setting.
You want to go as fine as you can
without beginning to have any interruptions to flow.
If you see any kind of drip, drip, dripping in the flow,
if you see kind of interruptions to the flow,
that's generally bad.
If you see a flow that starts very slow
and suddenly gets very quick, that's very bad.
The taste of a channelled brew
with these things is a weird combination
of it being quite weak, very harsh, very smoky,
very kind of bitter,
but also not very strong and also a little bit acidic too.
It's not a good cup.
It's to be avoided.
So generally, maybe one step finer than the factory,
two steps finer than the factory at most,
but really going very fine
on these things does not yield great results.
And now the process is pretty simple.
You've got your grind pretty close
to where you need it to be,
we're just gonna use ratio.
Each time you brew,
increase the amount of liquid used by five mls,
have a taste, you'll see an increase in sweetness.
an increase in clarity, increase in balance,
a decrease in acidity until suddenly you hit a wall
of bitterness.
And that's the point where you've got everything you want
and just a little bit more.
So you wanna go back five mls
to where you were previous to that,
and at that point you're getting maximum extraction
from the ground coffee that you're using.
As an espresso,
it might be a little bit lacking in terms of texture,
it'll taste weak.
It's probably half the strength of a traditional espresso
and more akin to the espresso you might get
from a little pod, but if you're gonna turn it
into another kind of drink, getting the good solubles out
of the ground coffee is
fundamentally the most important thing.
They're gonna get diluted down anyway by hot water,
by milk or a milk alternative,
so getting the flavors is the number one priority.
Now I did talk about diluting things down,
I do quickly wanna touch on pretty much every machine
having kind of a long coffee option.
It might be 120 mls,
it might be more than that, 200, 300 mls,
generally speaking, I would say we've worked hard
to get a good tasting extract that's like an espresso.
Just dilute that with fresh hot water.
Some machines will let you tap off hot water, other's won't,
some will do some fancy bypass brewing, others won't,
some will try and adjust the grind setting
for longer coffees and change the dose
and all of that stuff.
Start with the good espresso thing that we made.
Dilute it with water from a kettle,
water you boiled on the stove,
if you want the best possible results.
(machine whirs) This liquid here
does not taste good, I don't want it in my drink.
A few closing thoughts and tips and tricks and stuff.
If you're brewing specialty coffee,
make sure you adjust the brew temperature.
The factory defaults are often set quite low,
set it to maximum temperature.
For more developed roasts,
yeah, you could probably get down to a 3:1 ratio
and have a good extraction, but for lighter roasts,
I've yet to find a machine
for home that effectively does a good job
below a 4:1 ratio.
If you are just too frustrated by the drink,
being that little bit too weak for your tastes,
yeah, sure.
Go a little bit finer and start the process again.
Start back at three to four to one,
somewhere in that range,
and work your way through the extraction again.
But chances are, you're gonna need that bigger beverage
to get a good extraction.
None of these machines can brew very fine grounds well.
I know I keep saying that,
they'll often let you load ground coffee into them.
I wouldn't load proper espresso grounds into them.
They will not brew properly, but they can brew well.
If you adapt what you do around them,
then I think you can get some pretty good results
at the touch of a button.
But now I'd like to hear
from you down in the comments below.
Have you found something similar to me,
if you own one of these things?
Have you tried putting specialty coffee into
your super automatic and been frustrated by the results?
Maybe this will renew your interest in experimenting again?
I certainly hope so.
But let me know down in the comments below, but for now,
I'll say thank you so much
for watching and I hope you have a great day.