Finally. After weeks of research and painful days of waiting all pieces of my new coffee setup arrived by mail. I treated myself with a red Gaggia Classic Pro (E24 Version with brass boiler) and a DF64 grinder. I have a cheap coffee scale to weight the beans and the resulting cup of coffee. I’m using the stock filter basket and tamper that come with the Gaggia Classic.

The idea behind the setup is maximum quality espresso and ristretto for the lowest price. The quality aspect is more important than the price for me.

My coffee setup

Dialing in my first coffee

I wanted to get my hands wet without wasting tons of precious specialty coffee. I bought a supermarket coffee “Honduras fruité et boisé”, so a fruity coffee with a woody note. It was 20 euros / kg here in France.

My first recipe: 17g in, 34g out, 25-30s extraction time. 18g in, 36g out would have been even more “standard”, but otherwise nothing fancy.

I’m changing the grind size to make the coffee flow in around 27s. The results change vastly. I’m making changes and the outcomes are basically random. After several shots I feel the caffeine making my heart race, but each coffee was, in honest terms, disgusting.

Something is off. I’m trying to repeat the same shot twice. As I’m pulling the second shot with the same parameters as the first one, I immediately notice how different they flow.

Lesson of the day: My tamping is so bad that any changes I make to parameters like grind size are invisible in the noise. I call it a day.