Do you remember when I said I won’t do any experiments until after I’ve modded my machine? Yeah me neither. So here we go again. I’ve a good one today. Regular readers know my hero origin story. It all started with a cup of coffee in Vienna. I found the exact same bean. I ordered it. And it arrived today!
I pull a shot. Yes it flows too fast. Of course it does, I didn’t change the grind setting yet. Yes it’s been roasted 4 and a half months ago. According to the pros this coffee has already gone bad. But we’ll talk about them in a minute. So what can I expect? Nothing!
And damn the coffee is still so much better than anything else I’ve produced so far. Chocolate, caramel, a kiss from your loved ones, it’s all in there. What a day to be alive.
I hate specialty coffee
I meet a friend over a coffee the same day. We pick a fancy specialty coffee roaster in Lyon. Best conditions for good coffee, isn’t it? The coffee is terrible though. There’s no body, it’s watery, the mouth-feel is the same of bad tea. This experience is the tipping point. I’ve had this suspicion since a while, but I’ll make it official here and now:
I HATE SPECIALTY COFFEE!!
There I said it. Maybe it’s the style of French / Lyonnaise roasters. Maybe it’s more general. Anyway, I’m done with specialty coffee. They can sell their disgusting coffee to other idiots. I’m out. Italian style roasts and basta.
What is a specialty coffee anyway?
The wonderful James Hoffmann has made a video about this question. Go watch it! He classifies specialty coffee roasts into three categories: light, medium and dark. Revolutionary, isn’t it? But there’s darker than dark. That’s what he calls non-specialty coffee. A nice way to draw the line is to see if the beans are oily. If yes, the coffee is darker than a dark specialty coffee. My beans are oily. Case closed.
My wonderful coffee beans
Specialty coffee is supposed to be focused on the taste of the coffee fruit. That’s why they usually don’t do blends, but single origin roasts. The lighter a coffee is roasted, the fruitier and sour it gets. More roasting destroys the distinct flavors and creates a uniform coffee taste, that is best described as “brown flavors”, say chocolate, caramel, hazelnuts. Italian roasts are a very good example of heavily roasted non-specialty coffee.
Conclusions
We made a big step today: We accepted that the flavor I’m looking for is not the one of specialty coffees. Let’s draw some conclusions.
Firstly, I’ll need Italian non-specialty coffee beans. I already have them, nice. I can’t expect to have the same experience with other beans. Shit in, shit out how they say. I’ll stay with the beans I bought for the next couple of weeks. One variable less.
Secondly, most advice on the internet about “good” espresso shots is about specialty coffee. I’m sure that some of it can be applied more generally, but surely not all of it. For example: Good puck preparation is essential for consistent shots. That’s a general truth. However, I’m less sure about the coffee recipes. A good shot should take between 25-30 seconds, be a 1:2 ration with around 18g of coffee. I think I need to adapt that for my use-case.
I’m seeing a pattern with my latest tries to dial-in. I kinda have a taste I like, but it doesn’t follow the recipe. Usually it flows too quickly. So I adapt the grind settings to arrive at 27s flow for a 1:2 ratio. The result is not very good. It’s bitter. I know that darker roasts extract faster. So I think I need to ignore the time component a bit. And there’s another problem: Brew pressure.
My friend told me that he always pulls his shots in 27s. I tried the same, because I want to replicate his results. But his machine has a brew pressure of 9 bar, while mine has 12 bar. That’s a big difference. My machine will produce faster flow for the same grind. I need to factor this in.
The good news is, that the Gaggiuino mod will fix the pressure issue. Furthermore, it’ll eliminate another variable, temperature. I’ll need to adapt my settings once I have it on my machine.