Building a website is tough work and brewing coffee is my relaxing ritual, so you're now being subjected to some coffee talk. I make pour overs every day for our household - itt's pretty extra, I recognize that. There's a lot of satisfaction, though, in handing my partner a cup of meticulously made coffee in the morning.
French press used to be my go to, but the combination of filter and controlled immersion with a pour over gets me right up close to the bean. Right now my roaster of choice is Onyx; I really like their transparent pricing and absolutely wild lots of coffee. "Tropical Weather" is a stand out blend but I stick to single origin from them when possible.
It really does taste like lychee fruit. My partner says it's like sipping a coffee-tea hybrid (positive).
This past year I learned about co-ferments and alternative processes for prepping beans pre-roast; for instance, they'll put the coffees with the cherry (fruit of the coffee) still on into a chamber, and suck all the air out of the environment. Then they might pump in something like nitrogen, and it gets real weird in there. They'll also introduce watermelon or lychee into the environment during fermentation, and then when you're sipping a cup of that you're getting slapped in the face by fruit and citrus. It's nuts.
With a combination of great beans, a solid grinder, and a well developed brewing process I make a really fuckin' good cup of coffee. But what if I could go farther? That next arena, I believe, is espresso.
I'm getting married in September, and the gifts we asked for on our registry have started to roll in. One in particular we decided to "go for," and we put an espresso machine on the list. Kind of wishful thinking in that I didn't think we'd get quite enough to get it, but kind souls showed up for my crippling fancy coffee addiction. <3
The Breville Bambino Plus
I spent a lot of time listening to James Hoffman talk about this machine and others before picking it out. There are brewers that are more solidly built with more control over pressure and temperature, but the Bambino comes with some convenient features that make it more of a possible daily driver than some other more industrial options. Auto-sensing milk steaming! Tactile buttons for managing water temperature! Extremely fast pre-heating! It's a neat little thing.
That doesn't mean it makes brewing good espresso easy, though.
I've brewed espresso before, both in a shop (I did not work at one, but my friends owned a shop) and at home, but I can't say I've ever pulled an excellent shot. It's so easy for it to go too sour, too bitter, or "choke" the shot by grinding to finely or tamping down the bean dust excessively. Barista content creators will often refer to "dialing in" a particular coffee or set up, and I'm definitely in that phase. I think of the four I attempted today, I got one solid pull - and it was the shitty back up beans I keep in the hutch. What I really, really want is a 'syrupy' shot that drizzles out of the portafilter.
I have a nicer coffee grinder from Fellow, but the Ode isn't technically suited for grinding finely enough for espresso. I picked up a Commandante C40 recently in hopes that I'd be getting a proper espresso machine, and I was able to get that set up correctly (you manually turn a little thingy and it click-click-clicks so you can tell where you're at in terms of fineness) to get my coffee particles to acceptable granularity. Crankin' on the C40 can really tire your arms out!
Onyx Bean Dust
The first couple I tried had the C40 at 8 "clicks," and the resulting shot was horrible. Detecting which direction in which it had gone bad, however, was the truly frustrating part. Is this sour? Is this bitter? It certainly wasn't vegetal or too light, so in my mind that meant I was over-extracting and creating some bitter agents that contributed to the cup being 'astringent' and altogether unpleasant. Under-extraction, on the other hand, can result in espresso that is sour, vegetal, savory, or salty. Over-extraction tastes 'dry' and lacks sweetness or a nice finish.
For my subsequent shot, I attempted to apply less pressure during the tamp (in my mind, I'm turning little dials to adjust the brew) but I got a samey result. My partner suggested I stop using the fancy beans (lol) and use some of the trash in the cabinet. I clicked my grinder a tad coarser, and got a really solid showcase of the garbage beans ("Black Gold"). They taste a bit burnt, like a lot of commercial shitty coffee does, but with my auto-steamed oat milk it was a competent latte.
How do you think this tasted?
That's not what you want to see from a shot. The inconsistent, unbalanced dribble out of either side of the portafilter tells me I was still probably choking it a little bit. Just because a grind size works for one roast doesn't mean it will do for the other. The over roasted beans, for example, felt "soft" as I ground them with the C40, and the Onyx beans put up a fight and were tougher. I've also experienced during pour overs more resistance to draining depending on the coffee.
I will say, you can basically rescue most espresso with a little bit of sugar. While I really want to stir and sip syrupy espresso sans sugar, I'm fine stirring in a little sweetness or milk to save the experience. I like to use raw sugar and stir it together in my cute little espresso cups we got on vacation!
Anyways, massive failure Chucktowski signing off with what I hope was a somewhat educational post about coffee tech. I know I have a lot of gear, but it's worth mentioning I have saved and bought and collected it over the last five years or so starting during the pandemic. It can definitely be a little obnoxious when someone is stunting with their gear, and I'm not trying to do that at all. You can most certainly make a solid cup of coffee with an automatic coffee maker, and at the end of the day good coffee beans & grinding your own elevate the experience more than almost anything else.
Now back to my bug report tickets and my shitty espresso!