I'd like to give you a quick tour of the Decent Espresso Machine.
So here's the screen of the Decent Espresso Machine. This is the inside skin, this is the most fancy one.
And the idea here is it's going to do a pre-infusion and then a pressure shot, and then it goes into a decline.
I've been tweaking this slightly. All I've done is I've changed the timing and the pressure a bit,
and I'll show you how you do that.
I've just been tasting it, and I found that just a little bit less pressure - instead of 8.6 bars, 8 bars -
and a little bit slower pre-infusion seemed to work better for me.
And then, finally, I found that going down in pressure to 4 bars
- and then as I observe things I change them -
so in this case, I lowered the pressure at the end as I noticed it was really speeding up,
so I wanted that to slow down a bit.
I found that 8 bars was better for my level of puck preparation;
the higher the pressure, the more your puck preparation has to be perfect
because otherwise it'll go splat all over the place.
And I also found that just lowering the flow of the pre-infusion just made it taste a little less bitter.
Now, another way to go and learn about the espressos that this machine can make is simply to press things.
For example, this is the flow profile for milky drinks,
and this is one of the standard presets that gets recommended.
The idea behind this one is it just does a pre-infusion at a set rate,
and then the water flows out at a set rate during the espresso. The pressure is handled for you.
Let's prepare a coffee puck.
And I just tamp it down, lift, brush the grounds, in here.
I've also put one of our Bluetooth scales underneath the drip tray.
That's handy because the espresso is going to stop on its own when it hits a certain weight.
Now, the best practice for making espresso is to have a ratio between the coffee grounds in the coffee puck and the coffee out.
In my case, I'm doing 2:1. This is typical.
And here we are, we're making espresso, and you can see if I click here, it'll zoom.
We're getting a flow rate of about 1.5 ml/s.
What I was aiming for with this profile was a more or less even flow.
If the flow really accelerates, you get a lot of acidity on the mouth.
And that's why I made about 10 seconds here of pressure at 8,
and then I told it to decline. And you can see that the flow there started to increase,
and then, because I had the pressure decrease, the flow stayed flat.
The whole shot took 34 seconds, and that's what it looks like.
It's a nice-looking espresso. Let's steam some milk now.
So I use our milk thermometer because 5 degrees difference in Celsius makes a big difference,
and if you steam beyond about 65 Celsius, the coffee flavor will really change for the worst.
Okay?
And I'm going to put the steam wand in here and hit "Steam" and "Start".
And what you're trying to do is get this kind of "shhhh" sound.
This will take about 35 seconds, and you can see the thermometer is increasing temperature
every second here, and I just do this with one hand.
As the sound of "kkkksh" stops, I'm gonna just slightly lower, which is what I just did, the milk jug
so that that comes back again.
And each time, getting a little bit more foam.
Okay?
Until, just from memory, I've got the amount of foam I want.
That's about right, stop.
Okay, beep-beep-beep-beep.
You noticed what happened here is the steam wand automatically flushes at the end of the steam cycle.
That's to prevent any milk from going up. It's just a little time saver.
This is beeping, indicating a final temperature of 63°C.
And then I just pour it in like this.
Okay?
The thing about Latte Art is it's all in the last few seconds, the gestures there.
And so it's something you learn how to do but it's not that easy.
But don't worry about it, it doesn't change the flavor.
So there you go, there's a demonstration of the Decent Espresso Machine and how to make a latte.