Weighing things up

The two areas of my espresso making where I haven’t been happy thus far, are dosing and temperature control.  At some point in the future I will be installing a PID to my machine, but for now I am contenting myself with playing with dosing. 

Given that my kitchen scales had a precision of 2g, I definitely needed to buy some new equipment.  After a bit of research, I found that the best option for my needs was a cheap as chips pocket balance off of EBay.  For a mere £8 I got a balance that measures down to 0.1g, and although for the price I am suspicious of how accurate it is, it certainly seems consistent which is what really matters.

Having received the balance, the first thing I wanted to do was get used to the consistency.  I started with 17g as my dose, and started pulling some pretty decent shots.  The one thing that became very apparent at this point was that I was getting the occasional sour shot caused by not having the machine up to temperature.  I have since  been more careful to leave the machine on for longer before brewing to ensure that it is properly heated up.  In order to increase the consistency, I have now switched to having espresso days, and French press days.  This means that I can leave the machine on all day to get the temperature stability, and also means that I don’t have to worry about changing over grind settings (which leads to changes in dose due to left over grinds)

Now that I had the basics under control, I wanted to start playing, as my consistent 17g shot was not anything more than acceptable.  My first attempt was down to 14g, and one click finer on the grinder.  This definitely produced something more interesting, but I struggled with consistency, which seemed to be down to poor distribution of the grinds.  Next attempt was 15g, which was much more satisfactory.  Consistency was much improved, and suddenly the coffee for the week became a different animal.

Of course then the next batch of coffee turns up, and suddenly the equilibrium has been upset again.  This weeks batch is actually two coffees, a red and a yellow bourbon.  The yellow is working out OK at 15g, but the red is massively acidic, and is definitely not right.  The machine is warming up as I write this, so time for further experiments.  I’m thinking 16g is next, although having had a quick look around the www.home-barista.com forums today, I probably will try at least one 12g shot.