Welcome to the Decent Espresso Machine, and I want to show you how to make your first espresso on this machine.
So the first thing you want to do after you run the tablet is to pick the "Gentle and Sweet" profile.
Now, that's the one I recommend because it's the easiest shot to do well.
So here we are. We hit the "Settings" button, we hit "Presets", and here it is, "Gentle and Sweet."
So tap on that one in order to load it.
You can see that we have all sorts of other ones, and you can get to those later once you start having acceptable espresso.
First things first; make your first decent espresso, then start fiddling after that.
So let's hit OK.
We're going to load up 18 grams into our portafilter basket and then make an espresso.
I'm using a funnel so the coffee doesn't go overboard,
and one thing you'll see in all my videos is I'm always using the scale.
I can't recommend enough that if you do not use a scale, you will not progress in making espresso.
Put another way: get a scale, get better at making espresso.
So here I am weighing my coffee dose, and I will also be weighing how much coffee goes into the cup.
Generally, you'll want a ratio between the two. I'm going to go for a 2:1 ratio, which is typical:
18 grams here in the coffee puck, 36 grams in the cup.
That's what my coffee puck looks like before I've tamped it.
The goal is to try and get the grounds distributed in an even way around the basket.
This is the decent tamper, and our tamping cradle just makes things a little easier.
Also, you want to make absolutely sure that you've got a level tamp.
There's a little banana shaped piece of metal there; I'm just going to go slide in, I can feel and hear it lock in,
and then just pull it tight like that. You do not need to lock it in with a lot of muscle.
Finally hit the start button in order to make your espresso.
At this point, the machine is warming up and getting the espresso water temperature just perfect.
Now the espresso has started, and you can see the flow here during preinfusion and the green line is our pressure.
There's no pressure yet because the puck is still absorbing water.
And here we are: absorbing water, pressure going up, flow going down, and we're making our espresso.
I'm going to mind the scale here because I'm going to manually stop this now.
Okay?
So in the end I ended up at 29.5 grams of coffee in the cup.
I was aiming for 32, that's certainly close enough.
And that's what your first decent espresso shot looks like.
Now, going back here on screen, I can tap to zoom and you can see that my pressure rose up here to 6 bar,
the flow decreased down to 2.5, my total shot time was 23 seconds.
Now, that's a bit on the fast side,
so what I'd recommend as my next experiment - I'm going to make it with you here -
is I'm just going to add a little bit of coffee, rather than messing with the grind,
because the shot looks basically okay.
I'm going to put 19 grams of coffee in and just see if I can get that flow rate to come down a little bit
The other thing to notice is that you see my temperature here started out quite low,
And the reason is that I took my portafilter out, and I took quite a long time washing it out before I put the coffee in.
So the faster that you work, the more likely that temperature is going to look good at the beginning.
We have 19.2 grams.
Now in here, and I'm tapping this and I'm trying to work hard I can feel that the portafilter is nice and hot.
Now, you'll see on discussions on the internet that if you don't get this level, your flow rate will be faster
because the water is always going to go through the weakest part. And this is, in fact, not a great puck;
it's a little bit lower on the sides.
Whole other subject to conversation how to improve that but let's go ahead now.
I'm not trying to make the world's best coffee, we're trying to make a decent one,
and let's see how this plays out.
So here's the water going in, our pressure is staying low.
You can also look in the bottom of the basket, and you can see using this mirror what it looks like
Okay?
And here our flow rate came down just a little bit;
we're at about 2.5 ml/s on the previous one and now we're at 2 ml/s.
Now, that's firmly in the good espresso flow world, and I'm pretty happy with that.
So the recipe I've decided for this espresso is 19 grams of coffee with about 32 grams coming out.
You can see that it looks quite pretty.
Does not smell acidic at all, I mostly get kind of chocolatey vanilla notes.
This is a medium roast, so that's what I would expect from it.
And there you go, you've made your first decent espresso. The next thing you can do is start playing with your grind:
different beans, different doses, and of course all these different presets;
all the espresso machines and philosophies of the world are available to you on your Decent Espresso Machine.
Enjoy!