In this video I want to help you dial your grind in.
What that means is figuring out how coarse or how fine to make your coffee and how much to put in the portafilter.
Now, my advice to start is to use an 18 g portafilter basket and to put 18 grams of coffee in.
And one thing you'll note in this video is I'm going to be talking about weights a lot.
That means that you need to have a scale;
you need to weigh how much coffee goes into your portafilter and you also will need to weigh how much coffee goes into your cup.
Those two numbers are absolutely essential to making progress in making good espresso.
I've got a setup here where I can grind into a scale, so I'm going to grind 18 grams of coffee.
So I got 17.9 grams, and generally within 0.3 is perfectly fine.
More than 0.5 grams off and you should try and adjust things.
I'll show you that's what the coffee mound looks like, and you'll notice I use a funnel so that didn't spill everywhere.
What I'm going to do now is just tap it a little bit,
like so.
And next, I'm going to tamp it.
In these experiments, we're going to use the "Gentle and Sweet" profile, which goes to 6 bar,
and the reason we're doing that is that it is a fairly easy profile to get right.
The higher pressure you go the more your puck has to be prepared well,
and "Gentle and Sweet" is a good place to start. It only goes to 6 bar and then descends to 4.
I'm going to use a scale in order to weigh the amount of coffee I have and I'm going to aim for about twice as much coffee in the cup as I put in.
So 18 grams of coffee grounds in the portafilter and 36 grams in the cup.
I'd also like to have that land between, say, 25 and 45 seconds.
I'm not too worried about the time right now.
Now here we have water going in, and there's the pressure building, and the pressure is building,
building, and we're getting very few drips of coffee out.
Now, this will happen if you ground to fine.
Now, the only thing you can do at this point is either wait for 32 grams of coffee to come out or just give up.
Now, in this case, it's dripping so slowly, we're never going to get 32 grams of coffee out.
Now, I did that on purpose so you could see what it looks like when the coffee is ground too fine.
I'm going to go back here. And I'm going to coarsen the grind quite a bit.
So here I'm going to grind some coffee and then just throw it out because I've just greatly changed the grind.
Okay, tap again.
If you find that your coffee grounds are going slightly higher than the portafilter,
what you can do is just give it a little tap so it goes below.
I've got the water flow going in, the pressure is starting to rise, and the water is coming out.
And what you can see here is now this is too coarse, the water is just gushing out.
And you can see that as well because the machine had a hard time getting the pressure to happen.
Okay?
I've waited 25 seconds, and I've got almost 50 grams of coffee in.
Remember, I was only aiming for 36. So that's what too coarse looks like.
It means that the water pours through. You'll see that the pressure did rise and it did eventually hit the pressure goal of 6 bar.
However, the water flow had to climb up to 5.5 ml/s and just pumped through that puck.
And that's just going to be really bitter, unpleasant coffee.
So what we want to do is go between those two extremes and find a flow rate that we like,
with a grind size that we like.
But now we're going to make the grind finer again, but not as fine as it was before.
And this back and forth is basically what dialing the grind is all about.
So in we go, grind some coffee and then throw out what comes out.
So here's water flow going in. As pre-infusion ends, our pressure is going to climb, and that doesn't look so bad.
What we can do now is zoom in, and you can see that at 6 bars of pressure - that's the green line -
we're doing about 2ml/s of water.
I ended my shot at 26 seconds, and I've got 29 grams of coffee.
Now, I was aiming for 32, so I stopped it 1 second or 2 too early,
but nonetheless, this espresso now is looking pretty good. See that nice crema on there.
But this espresso is just about right: it ended in around the time I wanted, somewhere between 25 and 45 seconds,
- 25 to 35 would be the typical kind of goal that you have -
and I don't really have a problem with how this looks.
Now, if I wanted to make this a little bit slower and have it be a little bit thicker in the mouth,
at this point, I probably wouldn't change the grind because the grind is basically okay.
And you can spend hours fussing with the grind. Gets a bit tiresome, at some point, you want to just drink coffee.
So what I'm going to do is just add 1 gram more coffee, and you can see how that is going to affect this recipe.
So I've accidentally put 2 grams of coffee in too much, but since this is an experiment, hey why not.
Let's just go with the flow.
Once again, I'm going to tap here because here I'm putting quite a bit of coffee into the basket,
and make that espresso.
And you can see this is our progress here:
This was the first shot that was too fine coffee, so barely any coffee came out.
This was our second shot, which was too coarse, and it just poured out. Kind of watery and bitter.
And then this is our third one with 18 grams of coffee. That one looks just about right.
This is our final experiment. We're going to try 20 grams of coffee.
We're also going to pull it a little longer, number 2:1 is the ratio that we're playing with here.
We're going to try and have 40 grams of coffee in the cup.
You can see this shot is starting off a bit slower.
So we're at 6 bar of pressure, but our flow rate is only about 1.3 ml/s.
The previous shot was around 2 ml/s. Now, the slower it is the thicker it's going to be, the more concentrated it's going to be.
It won't necessarily be better, it's just going to be different.
So now I'm paying attention to the scale so that I manually stop this at the point I want.
And we end up at 39.3 g.
Now, if you compare this shot to this one, they're not worlds different.
Both of these are completely appropriate espressos to drink.
Generally, in terms of style, I would go for a faster flow rate in 2 ml/s to 2.5 ml/s if I want to drink it as an espresso or an Americano.
But if I'm adding milk, generally, I want a thicker beverage so it's less diluted,
and I go for a speed between 1 ml/s and 1.5 ml/s.
The key variables you want to keep in mind though is that you're keeping your pressure somewhere between 4 and 11 bar,
- that's the world of espresso, traditionally around 8 bar -
and that your flow rate is somewhere between 0.5 ml/s and on the high end 2.5 ml/s.
I find that faster than 2.5 ml/s, it's just too sour.
So I hope this little lesson in how to dial your grind in was helpful,
and if you have any questions, post questions online and I'll do what I can to help.