My Espresso machine didn't get much use last year, what with me not drinking any coffee and all. It's not a hugely posh one, but it does the job and can make decent little coffees. Although normally you end up taking more time to clean the thing afterwards than it took to drink the coffee. Sometimes the results from it are better than others, and I've never really determined to my satisfaction exactly what combination of factors makes the perfect Espresso.
As I see it, I can change the following variables:
1. Fineness of ground coffee (since I grind it myself).
2. Amount of coffee put in the little metal thing.
3. Amount of compression applied to coffee when in the little metal thing.
4. Freshness of ground coffee (ie time since grinding).
5. Freshness of water in water compartment.
6. Amount of water in water compartment.
I'm not sure that 4 to 6 actually make much difference, so that leaves me with just the first three things to worry about. And I'm pretty sure that for Espresso, the beans are supposed to be ground quite fine.
So if anyone has any tips to enable to make a fantastic cup every time, please tell me! Do I leave the coffee loosely packed? Do I tightly squish it in? Do I put in as much as I can? Etc? Is there something really obvious that I might have not thought about?
In addition, I have observed that after making the Espresso, sometimes the coffee grounds are quite wet and sometimes they are almost totally dry (and sometimes they are inbetween). Why is this?
Your help is, as always, most appreciated.
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4 comments:
You need to talk to Chip, he seems to be an coffee expert of sorts.
Seem to remember him saying something about the single most important thing is that the expresso maker is clean. Not just "doesn't show any ugly stains" but hospital-operating-theatre-clean.
Probably next comes freshly and finely ground beans, though I wouldn't know to be honest, I've never ground my own. I buy packet stuff, and dump a load of milk and sugar in it, so I'm not exactly a conesseur.
The water comes from a biggish tank, so the amount that goes through is fairly independent of anything much I do.
What Wayne says, basically.
I'm also going to disagree with GD, and (correctly remembered by Sarum), and say that cleanliness is next to tampedness. You must clean everything every time you use it. In hot soapy water, then rinse out with hot clean water. The coffee leaves behind oils which do not like being re-heated, and if you leave them behind, they make the coffee taste foul.
Thank you all for your help. I will experiment with the tamping. Not too hard, not too soft, but somewhere inbetween.
With regards to cleaning, I do that everytime anyway. It'd be horrible having a dirty espresso maker in the corner of the room!
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