Prosumer espresso machine

Yeah, there are no slow comparisons to a e61 group.

aaron.murphycrews

@Chris_Koller As someone who also has no time to escape life at the hospital, let me suggest a MyPressi Twist.

It isn't the ultimate home machine you are in the market for, but you could get one now to hold you over and then keep it at work after. It pulls a very passable shot, and it's been a pretty amazing companion through med school thus far. I would say the results I get are nearly on par with the Ms. Sylvia I used to have, which is really something given the portability and price. Here's how I get my fix on the go:

Jullian_77705

I am not muchaware of the Prosumer espresso machine. Where I bought a new club me espresso machine were it had some new features such as Standard auto leveller, single-scale manometer for the visualization of boiler pressure etc. And multidirectional steam wand allows you to easily-prepare creamy cappuccinos and frothy beverages.

Charles_emory_25628

The prosumer espresso machines feature the ability to extract espresso and steam/froth milk simultaneously. The larger boilers, typically found on these machines, usually allow superior temperature stability over home barista machines - resulting in superior flavor profiles in the espresso. These machines usually have more powerful steaming capabilities and capacity for those wishing to entertain.

Behmor 1600 roasted coffee, some bean I cannot pronounce the name on, very tasty.

QM67 Pull with a grind from a Virtuoso grinder.

Thanks for all the tips!

dzambrano_72198

Separating the fine grinds from the coarse grinds to find the perfect ratio? I like where this experiments seem to be going. Love how the conversation started with someone looking for recommendations on $1,500 tops espresso machines. Going back to the roasting process, I agree with @jimseven its mostly "artisanal". I'm trying to get into the roasting process myself, was thinking about buying the iRoast2, I started visiting local roasters and realised they where mostly using the same old drum roaster and how bad it is at controlling all the variables. Thats when I started thinking, What about roasting coffee in a Combi Oven? Sadly, I don't have the money for it and unlike my home made water bath for sous vide, building a combi oven isn't that simple(although I am looking into it, specially after reading MC's chapter on it and how they tend to be inaccurate). But after looking through the window at the ChefSteps lab in Seattle, when I was there on vacations two weeks ago, and being quite impressed with their equipment, I would go on to suggest you guys get involved in the roasting as well. Moving on to different ideas for roasting, and trying to figure out how to solve the combi ovens temperature inconsistencies(10C might be too much of a margin here), what do you think of roasting coffee sous vide? Obviously one single bath wouldn't be able to handle the fast temperature changes that the roasting process needs but maybe have 2 or 3 baths ready at hand and simple move the coffee from one to the other could solve that problem. What do you think? I have two baths, and can build another one(I've heard some roasting techniques require 3 different temps). Would you recommend I started experimenting with that? As far as my equipment goes, its not as pro as yours. I have a Rancilio Silvia but paired it with a La Pavoni ZIP Auto Grinder I found second hand for 200dls. Loved the pdf on the water variable, I did in fact install a reverse osmosis and carbon activated combo filter for my water supply. Going back to the espresso machine, I was thinking about upgrading to a Pasquini Livieta but decided I wanted to go into roasting first.

Well, talking to the awesome gals my wife got us a Virtuoso for drip.

Still taking bids on the right weight puck and brew

I'd go for the vario for beginning espresso stuff, I'm pretty much financially where @JimSeven thinks we should be

on the group and machine.

Herkimer, they are our favorite at the moment.

http://herkimercoffee.com/about.html

@Grant_Lee_Crilly What coffee were you using? We roast a little lighter than the West Coast so we'll probably have a little more success.

Brendan_Lee_56950

what if you hit the beans with liquid nitrogen before sieving to keep them from clumping, I wonder what effect it would have on flavor.

Ok, I just tried the sieve a ton of espresso and should have seen that one coming. No way that you will get a dry/oily product to go through sieves at that fine a mesh. I had so much trouble just getting it through a 200 micron. About a pound of grounds that were just tuned for espresso to get a couple teaspoons after 200 micron. Trying to get anything to go through a 100micron will never happen. On dig sites, minerals are washed with water often to lube the mesh help separate, clean and flow through the sieves. That wont work here though(flavor and swelling).

I love it! Thanks. Cant wait to have you out here to Seattle again. We will get some great coffee videos done. We have on schedule to shoot with LaMarzocco, and several of the best baristas and roasters here already. For now, I will try the sieves.

@Grant_Lee_Crilly You're right - if we had absolutely everything being between say 100-110 micron, then we should be able to find a way to extract that to the point of peak taste preference, and at a resulting concentration that we enjoy (good espresso is between 10-12% strength for example). We can't do that right now, not very easily anyway. I am happy to get the sieves back out though!

As for the problems of the beans - really the grey area remains roasting. We're all working pretty much blind, getting to wherever we are via trial and error. Our methods of monitoring roasts are extremely crude and inefficient, and honestly we're mostly unable to have any real control of the cascading reactions within the Maillard, Strecker degradation and caramelisation categories.

Most roasting machines use k-type probes, positioning in amongst the jostling mass of beans being churned around by the fins inside a drum roaster. If you record a roast, and then repeat the time and temperature profile you don't get a consistent product and anyone who says you do either isn't tasting their own coffee or they're not being entirely truthful. However, instead of investing in a better way to monitor and record roasting we just keep trying and hoping that somehow it will work this time....

I'm a little off topic at this point so I shall cut the ranting there!

Jack_Mayer_85396

@Jim - thank you for a thorough explanation. This discussion is fascinating for me; I'm eager to learn more.

Brendan_Lee_56950

What if you layered a small layer of fines and then the rest with the bigger particles to promote the resistance in the puck, that way maybe you could figure out an ideal amount of fines to other sized particles by pulling shots and tasting?

Still confused. Seems like there should be an ideal amount of some x sized particles to some ratio of z size particles. Seperate them all and dry bend to a perfect ratio. If not, what's the problem with the way grinders grind now. I feel like these coffee problems become more of a technical pursuit of what is "ideal" more so than what taste good at times. Food suffers from this at times right now. The problem seems to be the beans, not the grinders to me.

There isn't really an ideal size, as espresso grinders are bimodal in their distribution. Some fines are necessary - if you remove them then it is hard to get adequate contact time because the puck doesn't offer much resistance. This is the problem with high pressure percolation (espresso) - you need some fines, but not too many.

If you want you could screen out the fines and try pulling shots, but things are likely to go quite badly. Just about every frustration I have with coffee brewing comes back at some point to grinding coffee.

Grinders like Mahlkoenig's EK43, with their Turkish burrset (you need a different burrset to grind very, very fine as required by turkish coffee - the grounds feel like flour) - then you can hack your way to an espresso that hits about 22% extraction and tastes great. This is a pain in the ass though.

@Jim

Is there an ideal particle size for espresso? Or at leasts a narrow range? We have very nice lab sieves that we can do little tasting with. It would be nice to post the results and visuals for the different sizes as well. Let me know what you think.

Oh - and as for Seattle: Not soon enough!

Very interesting, thank you!

@Chris

Extraction Vs Grind profile - I shall do my best to explain in a helpful way.

Intro:

Only about 30-32% by weight of ground coffee is soluble. The rest could be described as basically being wood, and isn't at all soluble.

Not everything that is soluble tastes good. Experiments over the years have shown that if you extract 18-22% of the ground coffee then things generally taste better.

Grind profile is where things start to get complicated. Grinders can't produce absolutely uniform particle sizes when grinding coffee because coffee is so brittle, and generally we're using a pretty basic set of cutting discs. Typically there will be a peak in occurrence of two different particle sizes - a peak of very fine pieces, and a peak that represents your average desired consistency for the particular brew method.

Going back to our ideal 18-22%: It is important to realise that this is an average (as we can only measure our extraction by measuring the resulting liquid's refractive index). Tiny pieces will extract more - as they have a larger surface area to mass of those pieces. They might be extracting up towards 30%. The more fines you have the more you'll start bitterness from their high extraction. Medium sized pieces might be extracted to 20%, and any larger pieces will under extract - maybe even as low as 10%.

So you could overextract a load of fine particles, and underextract a lot of big pieces, but the average would still look good - despite the cup not tasting great.

The better the grinder the less fines it will typically produce. This means that you can grind a little finer on average and extract more of everything else. Experiments done with sieving out one particular particle size range and brewing it show that if you take some truly uniform coffee grinds and extract 26% of them - it can still taste really great. Fines are ruining it for everyone.... If we could get rid of them then we could use less coffee and still have a cup that is just as strong because we could extract everything else a little more.

Espresso burrs complicate things even further here. If we looked at the above coffee being used for an infusion like a French Press then we can easily control our contact time.

With espresso the contact time is controlled by the resistance the bed of coffee gives to the pressurised water coming from the pump. So not only will our grind profile influence the exposed surface area, but also the contact time.

This is why I struggle with the cup quality of grinders like the Robur. Their profile contains enough fines that your average grind has to be a little too coarse in order to have regular/acceptable flow rates through the coffee. If you go finer then you start to get too many fines before you get to the point where most of the coffee mass is properly extracted.

I find it hard to extract above 18.5% on a Robur unless I am using a darker roasted coffee (which I don't really like to do). Darker roasts are more porous and generally easier to extract. I've had higher extractions on flat burr grinders - which are slower in a commercial setting but preferable to me from a taste perspective.

Chris_Young_80640

Oh, and if I haven't told you already, welcome to ChefSteps. Awesome to have you be part of our community, and when will you be getting to Seattle?

Chris_Young_80640

@James — Any chance we can get a post on why one set of burrs can get a much better result—soluble extraction—than another? I think I understand this subject more than most, and even I'm not entirely clear on why a more uniform distribution (well, tight bi- or tri-modal) results in greater extraction yield.

@jimseven I actually think your post and your second post as well were great.

I've read, re-read, conferred with other coffee heads, I've had coffee from the Anfim, I've had a pull from the GS3 - Sure you put things into perspective but I also think (and I hope you wanted that) you'd with a crowd like this incite rebellion

We, since you told us we'll fail will be forced to try!

The knowledge, research, comments, inspiration and sharing is valued far more than you know.

Thanks!!

Gah... 3.5k that is like 2 days of billing...

Just kidding

FYI, I find lots of single group GS-3's in Seattle's Craigslist for around 3-3.5K often. None on at the moment.