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Know Your Grinder’s Limitations and Work With Them
Not everyone has a Versalab M4 grinder to pull shots with. Not everyone has an Mahlkonig EK43. And not everyone has a Compak K10 Conic to make espresso with. What do these grinders have in common? They allow for stepless, infinite grind adjustments.
Many people are working with grinders that have maybe 3 or 4 “clicks” on their grind adjustment to play with for espresso sized grinds. Some may have as many as 10 or 20 settings they can use to get particles in the range of espresso. The fact is, on some grinders, the difference between one “click” on a grind adjustment can be the difference between a double shot that runs for 15 seconds to produce 60ml, and 40 seconds to produce that same 60ml (if the dose weight is the same).
But you can work with that. This is where your dose – the weight of the ground coffee you’re using for your espresso machine and portafilter – can be controlled and changed by you. Never be chained to a fixed dose weight for espresso. If you learned to pull shots with 18.5g of coffee for a double, consider that your baseline, not the rigid, be all, must be amount.
When dialing in a new coffee roast for espresso, after the first double shot is pulled, there will either be an adjustment to the grinder (if the double runs super fast or slow), or an adjustment to the dose used (if the double shot is close to being okay). Part of this process is knowing what your grinder is capable of when you’re changing the grind.
If you’re working with a Baratza Vario grinder and its micro and macro grind adjustments, then fiddle with the grinder’s micro adjustments up or down before changing my dose weight because there’s 20 different micro adjustments that can be made.. If you’re working on a Rancilio Rocky which has pretty big jumps in grind fineness levels between clicks, gravitate towards changing your output dose weight.
A safe dose adjustment volume is 1.5 grams, up or down. So if your baseline is 18g, go as far down as 16.5g and up to 19.5g to dial in your shot pull. Here is one example of how to use this:
Let’s say you’re pulling double shots with a Baratza Virtuoso+, and dosing out 14.5g for a shot with an Elektra lever machine. You get a 40g double shot in 20 seconds. What to do? Try upping the dose by 1g without changing anything on the grinder. However, If that shot runs in 15 seconds for 40g, try going one full click finer on the Virtuoso+, then dose the same volume of coffee out again (14.5g) and see if that gives you a better running shot in the 25 second range.
When dialing in a new coffee roast for espresso, this is the first element you should consider adjusting after being happy with the grind fineness level: Adjust the dose by as much as 1.5g up or down. If the grinder you’re working produces a shot that’s just a bit stalled at, say “7” on its grind dial, but runs way too fast at “8” for the same dose, go back to “7” and use 1g less coffee on your next double shot pull.
Taste
When dialing in a new coffee – single origin or blend – for espresso, taste everything. Even the worst, gusher shots. Even the super slow, poured out 10ml shots. Taste experience is part of your arsenal for making better espresso and achieving the goal of being able to dial in any coffee, on any grinder, with any espresso machine within three double shot pulls.
Sometimes espresso can surprise you. A shot that looks blond, thin crema, and took too long to pull might taste absolutely fantastic. And equally, sometimes when a shot looks visually perfect, it might taste sour or bitter, or just bland. Always taste everything, Gordon Ramsay said, and we do as well at CoffeeGeek.
Tasting is especially important in the middle of your 3 dial in shot pulls because it helps you identify issues with the espresso machine, including brewing temperatures, machine cleanliness, and even how well the coffee puck was tamped and prepared.
If you have an espresso machine with temperature settings that can be adjusted, your taste will help guide you in possibly changing this to produce a better shot. Shot tastes sour? The machine’s temperature is too low. Shot tastes burnt and bitter? Brewing temperatures might be too high.
What if your machine doesn’t have temperature controls? You can still tweak things up or down by flushing the brewing group for 5 seconds (to heat it up more) before putting the portafilter in place and pulling your shot, or running your portafilter under cold water for a few seconds to cool things down a bit. Think out of the box if your espresso machine has limitations. I remember once wrapping a cold cloth around the grouphead of a lever espresso machine to get the water temperature down to alleviate a problem with too-bitter shots, and it worked.
If you taste a weak, over extracted coffee, one culprit might be your tamping technique. Pressurized water will always follow the path of least resistance, and if there’s an imbalance in your tamping, where one side of the puck seems higher than the opposite side, you will produce an over extracted double shot, because more water ran through the thinner part of the puck than the thicker part. Taste will help you see these kinds of errors.
Taste will also tell you it’s time to clean your machine. You do regularly clean your espresso machine: it’s dispersion screen; the inside of the portafilter; backflusing the lines; and making sure the underside of your filter basket is clean? If not, you may pick up some astringent and even rancid tastes in your shot pull.
That Third Shot
By the time you arrive at the third shot pull, you may have made a ton of adjustments, or just a few minor tweaks. How did you get there?
All your hard work comes after the first shot pull, using your analytical brain to figure out what grind setting needs adjusting, what dose tweak is needed, if the machine’s temperature needs a change, and if your tamping game needs some fine tuning. You should see your biggest change to better between your first shot and your second.
But what if that’s not the case? What if all your tweaks resulted in a worse second shot pull? Don’t panic! Instead, put your skills and thoughts into overdrive, analysing why the shot is worse.
Did it gush out just like the first shot, even if you added a gram to your dose? The solution might be going a full click finer on the grinder (and grinding off some coffee into the waste bin to get rid of any ground coffee left in the grinder between uses), and dropping back down to your original dose amount.
Maybe your shot times are bang on the second time, but the shot just tastes worse? It’s possible that coffee is better suited for a faster (or slower) running shot. Again, experience is your best weapon here: learn each time what change makes what effect, and put that into your catalog of skills.
And at the end of the day, that’s what’s going to make your espresso better: experience. Experience with failures, attempts to fix failures, and failing again. As long as you learn just a smidge every time, getting to that goal of a dialed in third shot of espresso can be a reality in a few months, or maybe a few years down the road.
This is why I implore you to not be disappointed if your third shot pull hits the mark and results in a perfect shot of espresso when introducing a new coffee to your home setup. It’s quite hard to achieve this if you’re being completely honest with yourself.
I’ve been doing this for over 20 years now, and I still don’t get it at times. Indeed, the inspiration for this article was a rather excellent decaf espresso received recently that took me six dial in shot pull attempts (with a bevy of adjustments in between each) to get it right. Once the grinder, coffee and espresso machine were singing, it was an absolutely devine double shot of espresso.
The fantastic thing about that six dial in attempts? Once again, I managed to learn something new that hopefully will improve my skills. And that is the real goal and reward of the “Three Shot Pulls to Dial in Espresso” mantra: it’s not about getting a perfect shot in three shot pulls, and everything about being a better barista.