Struggling with Espresso? This Beginner's Guide Will Change Everything!

Espresso is the heart of every single drink that we do when we're making coffee. It can be the foundation for a great milk coffee or a black coffee. And if you're a beginner, I know it can be pretty daunting trying to work out how you can do this well. So I'm gonna be covering some of the key things that you wanna look at when you're beginning with espresso. I'm gonna bust the four most common myths around coffee and extractions. I'll cover what pre-ground coffee is actually good for, introduce you to espresso extractions. It's just like baking a cake. And how to clean your machine for optimal taste. The world of home coffee has been totally changed over the last few years. It's turned our kitchens into home espresso bars. And I know that's an amazing feeling when you can dial in and get that perfect espresso, but it also can be pretty terrible. You can have bitter, sour, or really terrible experiences in making a great home coffee, and you can waste a lot. So let's take a ride in trying to work out how we can teach you as a beginner to make that perfect espresso. First, we're gonna start with the grinding game. It's the foundation of espresso extraction. It's time to get serious about your grind. If you're buying a pre-ground coffee product from a supermarket or anywhere particular because you don't wanna buy a coffee grinder, you are wasting your time. You need to have fresh ground beans every time you're gonna extract coffee so you can get the most flavor out of it. So get serious, get yourself a grinder, and you're gonna take your game to the next level. You have to have the ability to change the grind either coarser or finer relative to the age of the bean, the type of roast that you actually have purchased, and the humidity or what's happening in the environment that you've got. So if you don't have the ability to change that grind consistency, you're hoping that the roaster or whoever ground those beans got them actually right for you based on the recipe that your machine needs to make great coffee. And I'm gonna talk about recipes in just a moment. Because grind size is so important, when water comes into your coffee basket, if it's too coarse, the water's gonna go through very quickly, it's gonna underextract the coffee, it's gonna be sour and really unpleasant. You're not gonna be getting all the full flavors out of it. On the other side, if your grind is too fine, it might not even come out at all. It actually may become quite bitter or the amount of coffee and water recipe by the time it actually ends up in your cup, because it brewed for so long in the actual basket, could be terrible and then you risk overextracting, going right into the bitterness side of things. It's so important to be able to have that flexibility to get a balance between too coarse or too fine to make sure it fits the recipe. Any grinder is better than no grinder. So whether you're gonna go and get yourself an entry-level Breville grinder, something like the DF54 single-dose flat burr grinder, or if you're gonna go all out and get yourself an all-ground sense, which has weight-based and flat burr technology, you're gonna have different variations in taste and profile that's gonna come out as you grind that. So there was a few things there that individual grinders have, and let me just try and help you understand which is the right grinder for you. The first thing to look at is flat burr versus conical. Now, conical burrs are basically going to grind a lot quicker and a lot easier. They have a lower-powered motor, but when they're grinding, they will get a dose or an amount of coffee a lot quicker. Now, you'll probably find that that will give you a bit more of a bold flavor and maybe bring in a little bit more bitterness. It's not gonna give you that higher acidity or fresher floral flavors that will come through. A flat burr grinder will have to spin a lot faster and it will give you those beautiful floral notes or some more clarity, essentially. It's gonna have a higher-speed motor, causing more friction, which then can get a bit more clumping, perhaps. So there's two pros and cons between the two. You're either adding more heat to the grind in a flat burr because it's got that friction, or you're getting less friction with a conical, but it's gonna give you a muddy flavor. So in the entry-level grinders, that's something you wanna consider. When you start to go to something like the All Ground Sense, which is a high-end grinder and a flat burr, they get a bigger size, they get some better coatings like carbon or titanium over them to reduce friction and allow those issues of heat and time to be fixed because they can grind more quicker per revolution, but also maintain less heat applied to the grind. The next thing to think about is hopper or single dose. The main thing to consider here is if you're the kind of person that's just gonna be putting beans in and putting your handle on and getting coffee, maybe for yourself or a couple other people in the household, and one of you wants to dial that in and get it pretty ripe for a recipe, and the other people don't really care, a hopper grinder is the best thing for you. If you're the kind of person that wants to go with maybe a single origin, a dark roast, a light roast, or if there's a decaf lover in the family, and you need to change in between all these different beans regularly and continually dial them in, you would definitely look for a single dose grinder because there is zero retention once the beans go in past the blades. All of the grinds are gonna end up in your catch pot and it'll be clean, ready for any adjustment or the next bean that you wanna put in. And then you've got time versus weight based. Now, last year we saw the introduction of weight based grinders. So the Firenzato All Ground used to have a time based setting, but now the new Sense is a weight based delivery. So essentially if you put your portafilter handle onto the rest, it will actually deliver the grind by the weight that you have chosen in the grinder. Typically with old time based grinders, you had to allocate an amount of time, let's call it 10 seconds, to make the motor work at the grind setting you've chosen to then fill up the portafilter handle, hoping that you're gonna get the grinds in the weight amount that you're after. Now, we know now that having the exact amount of dose or the amount of grinds in that portafilter handle is really specific to getting great coffee. You're either gonna play around with a time grinder and make sure you're dialing in a lot more, or if the budget allows it, you can get yourself into a weight based grinder and you won't have to worry about that option. So now let's talk about the actual art of pulling an espresso extraction. Now, this is where we dive deeper into the recipe, but we can't have a recipe until we know what tools we've got. Now, every machine is gonna have either a different circumference here of the actual basket, it's gonna have a different depth or shape, and depending on the flavor that you're after, you need to work this out so that you can get the recipe that works for you. Now, what I'm talking about here, we do have in our downloadable guide that you can take you through this whole process, and there's a whole heap of other content in there, so check that out on our website. But essentially, this is what the old Italian basket used to be for a single espresso. You could put seven or possibly nine grams of coffee in it, and you can see it's 58 mil at the top and going down to about 25 mil at the bottom where the holes come through. So there is a big pressure variance in there, and you're gonna have a different amount of coffee. The double standard Italian was like this one. It looks big, but it does have a taper, again, on that variation between the top and the bottom of the basket, so it's not gonna be a straight flow of water through, there will be a variation as it hits the curve there, and that's something you'd have to factor in. You can usually fit 19 and a half grams of coffee in this basket. Then you've got something like an 18 or a 19 gram straight wall. Now, this is a much better defined basket because they've taken away the curve and it allows the water to go all the way straight through, giving you an extra gram or maybe two into that basket, but it's a much better flow of water through the basket. So that's what I would look to try and get if you can fit it because sometimes the basket shape doesn't, it is curved so it fits in the portafilter handle, otherwise this straight edge might not quite make it all the way in. If you have a very deep portafilter, you can go to something like this. It could be a 21 gram or a 25 gram straight wall, and this would be working on a naked portafilter handle or a much deeper portafilter handle. So it is very big, so be careful if it doesn't fit in. If your portafilter handle has any sort of bevel on the edge here, it's not gonna fit. So try and check that you've got a nice straight portafilter radius here, and then you'll fit the deep basket in it. In the triple basket, our standard recipe is 22 and a half grams. We talk about that in lots of our videos and it's what we use commercially. So if you can achieve that at home, you're gonna be very close to cafe quality. The next thing we've got to look at is the dose, and that is where you need to weigh how much coffee is specifically in the basket that you have. Now, if you're not gonna weigh this, you could go up or down by one gram, maybe one and a half or even two grams, and it's gonna be an inconsistent extraction. If you know that you've got the right amount of coffee in there every single time, all we're gonna have to look at is the actual flow that comes out through that coffee bed after you've activated your water to go onto the coffee bed, and you would only be adjusting the grind settings now because we don't wanna change temp pressure. That is a huge issue. We wanna be consistent in the dose, the amount of grinds in that actual basket, and we wanna be consistent in the pressure that is applied to that coffee. So don't think you're gonna be pushing harder to make it stronger or any of those things or putting more coffee in. It's really not a good outcome. So get yourself a little set of scales and you'll be able to measure the dose that is in your basket, but you'll also be able to measure the yield, which is the next part of our recipe. So the yield is how much liquid weight actually ends in the cup after you've extracted all of your liquid. So we wanna have a recipe or a ratio between the dry amount of coffee and the liquid that ends up in the cup. Now, if we're talking, keeping it really simple, a single shot is going to be a ratio of one to one. So one part of coffee at the top, let's call it 20 grams, when we've got 20 grams of liquid in the bottom and we were stopping our extraction, that is a one-to-one ratio, and it's actually a ristretto. It's because less water has been passed through that coffee, giving you a little bit more intensity, some sweetness and better flavors. So that is the first recipe that you could use. Now, most people think, hey, I like stronger coffee. I wanna double shot. So what you'll be doing is making the ratio of two to one. So two parts water, one part coffee. In the cup, if you've got 20 grams of coffee in your dose, you're gonna have 40 grams in your cup. And that is going to give you a range of different flavors. So you're gonna have the intense sweetness that'll come out, then you'll get some acidity, some fruity flavors, and the texture of the actual liquid coming out into the cup over that longer amount of time is gonna reduce and it'll become more balanced. So that might be what you would like, but hey, do a shot for yourself. Test a one-to-one ristretto or a one-to-two, normal is what we call it, and see what you like best in your favorite coffee. It could be a bigger amount of milk, maybe going a double shot, or the two-to-one's gonna be the way to go. It might be too intense when you've got a very small cup. So it's great to play and work out with your own cup, the ratio of coffee to milk, because that's the other part of the recipe people forget. No two cups are the same, especially in the home market. You might have your big favorite mug that you got on Mother's Day or Father's Day, and your kids might have something smaller they like because they like a piccolo or whatever. So do some bit of a test to see what you actually like in the particular cup, and then jot it down. You'll be able to actually measure how much coffee, how much yield that you want in there for your particular cup, and you'll be able to repeat it every single time that you want to make a coffee. The third part to a brew recipe is time. Now, time is what we use to measure so that we're getting that good flavors in either the ristretto or the normal extractions. Now, all I can give you is a general amount of time based on a bigger basket. So our standard recipe, when we're using our triple basket here of 22 1⁄2 grams dose to get us a two-to-one ratio, which is going to give us our 45 grams of yield in the cup, is 32 seconds. We think that works really well. So if you're going to be lessening the amount of coffee by using a smaller basket, I would still advise you to try and aim for around 30 seconds, because if the yield is ending up in the cup in 10 seconds or 15 seconds, it's just gonna be under-extracting that coffee way too much. You definitely have to grind finer to slow the flow of water through because the grind particles are so much closer together to get to that higher time. You'll find a more balanced and even flavor, and you will hopefully avoid the bitterness because we're not over-extracting as well. So I recommend that you stick with one type of bean for a little bit of time when you're trying to work out a recipe. If you're gonna start playing with recipes and then buying beans from your local cafe or from the supermarket and keep changing week in, week out, you're actually not gonna understand how grind is actually going to affect your recipe. Because you've got a different product every single time, you might have an older bean from the supermarket, you might have a lighter roast from the cafe down the road, and you're actually got a lot of other factors that are gonna be a problem. So I do recommend just sticking with one particular bean, sticking with it for three or four months, and just making sure you buy that regularly so that the freshness stays the same, and that's gonna give you more repeatable results. Don't go out and buy yourself multiple, three or four bags, and then think you're gonna use that over three months, because by the time you get to that last bag, it's gonna be aged and terrible. So find a good supply, buy regularly, keep them reasonably fresh, and your recipes are gonna be far more accurate and the taste is gonna be more consistent. Once you've nailed that, then go and play with light roast, dark roast, whatever you fancy, because at least you know that you'll be able to change the grind according to the time for the recipe that you've already designed for your machine. The next topic I have is maintenance matters. Cleanliness is such an important part of coffee. If you're not gonna clean your machine, all those coffees you've already made are gonna leave a remanence in your machine and taint the flavor of what you're trying to achieve today. You definitely need to clean your group handle. Now, a lot of people just think flushing water through here is gonna do the job. It isn't. You're gonna have to remove the basket. It's quite simple and easy to do, and you'll see that on the bottom of here, there will be a lot of residue and buildup. Also, inside the portafilter here, give it a good scrub. Get some of the cafeto or coffee machine cleaner in here. Give it a bit of a scrub as well. Some of those green non-scratch scoury pads would be ideal. This has had the spouts removed, so you can remove them off your machine because inside those spouts, it can get a lot of buildup and you definitely want this hole to be nice and clean. I'm gonna recommend here to resist the urge to soak this in a milk jug. Now, we see this all the time in cafes where baristas get a milk jug and they put cafeto cleaner in and dunk the portafilter handle into it. At home, I want you to stop and resist this urge to do it because what happens is the cafeto cleaner is going to eat away at the handle. It could be plastic or timber, but it also wrecks the glues and the threads that are connecting these two together, and you're only damaging a handle for the sake of you taking a few minutes to actually clean this basket properly. There's no real need to soak it if you keep on top of your cleaning. If it does get really bad, okay, a bit of elbow grease and you're gonna get it back like new and no remnants of other coffees are gonna end up in your current espresso. Backflush, backflush, backflush is the next tip. A lot of people don't clean their machine enough with chemical, let alone backflush with water. After you finish your espresso, make sure you hit the button or the lever to have water come through first because that's gonna get rid of any coffee that's sitting up in that shower screen. And then if you pop your blind basket in with water, you'll be able to lock it in and pump some water through your solenoids and the group head and get rid of some of the excess that's sitting in there. Now, that would be ideal to do after every time you've made coffee. You may clean once a week, but you know what? If you're just walking away after finishing your coffee, leaving your handle sitting in there, it's just gonna have all the coffee oils build up, go hard and wreck your holes through the shower screen so it won't extract properly for next time, but also all that coffee oil is gonna sit up there, stink, go terrible, be a bit nasty for your next coffee. I get it, you might be really diligent in putting chemical backflush through your machine, but you still have a bit of a funny taste. What you need to do is remove your shower screen. Some of them will pop out quite easy with a flathead screwdriver, or they may have a screw right in the middle that you just unscrew. When you get that out, you will see that there is still a fine sediment or even a big buildup on the shower screen. And if you have a look up under in the group head, there will be a lot of this toffee and tarry kind of liquid that can smell a little bit ashy. So get that shower screen out, give it a good scrub. Your group brush should look like a shaggy toothbrush. If it doesn't, you definitely aren't cleaning your machine well enough. Now, my last tip here is filtered water. It's so essential to making great coffee. Coffee is made up of so much water. Your coffee machine uses a lot of water to make sure that it can make a great espresso. Now, a lot of councils have their controls in place to put some chlorines and all these other different things that are in a water to make it drinkable, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's good for coffee. You can get buildup on the inside of your machine and you're gonna eventually end up descaling. So if you're gonna get yourself a good under bench filter system, or perhaps invest in buying some good bottled water from the supermarket, you're gonna look after not only your machine, but you're gonna have a much cleaner water and a better quality water that isn't tainted one way with either metals or salts or chlorines or whatever it might be that will actually change the taste of your espresso. Now it's time to bust the myths that we always hear. It's funny, I go to somebody's house and they think they know everything about coffee and then they realize that I know a little bit about coffee and they always come up with these similar things. So here are my top four myths that we need to bust. The first one is, I don't have to adjust my grind because I buy the same beans all the time and it always tastes great. That is totally false. You have to change grind given the weather conditions, the age of the coffee, and also if you're a hard tamper or a soft tamper. So if you're a person that, you know, if I'm making a coffee and I push lightly and the next person's hard, technically you have to adjust the grind based around those differences. So grind adjustment has to happen in the morning, it's gonna be very different to midday, and in the afternoon it's gonna change again. So I know we did a video on grind adjustments in the bar, so check that one out as well. Jimmy's done a great job on that one for extra details. Myth number two, the harder the tamp, the stronger the coffee's gonna be. No way, that is not gonna help you at all because it is all about the grind particle size and how the water is gonna flow through that coffee bed. If you're gonna decide to tamp really, really hard, you could have a very coarse grind, doesn't matter how hard you tamp it, the water's still gonna flow through. If you've gone super fine and you tamp hard, well, the water won't come through at all anyway, but more so because you're on the fine side. It'll look like a muddy sort of wet puddle on the top and nothing's gonna come through, but essentially you're over-brewing or under-brewing the coffee because of that tamp pressure. It's got nothing to do with actually the flavor that you're gonna end up in the cup, all you're trying to do is affect the flow, but it is all about the grind. Number three, if I jam my portafilter in further, it'll make a stronger coffee. That is totally incorrect. All you're doing is damaging your machine. You're actually pushing this part of your coffee basket further up into your machine, you're compressing the seal that allows those two parts of the coffee machine to not have the water leak out, and you're also then bringing the coffee level where you've tamped higher and higher up to the shower screen. Now, we now have proven over the years that we actually wanna have a gap for the water to come into a coffee basket, to level out, and then brew with the right grind setting, either coarse or finest, whatever it is, based on the recipe, to give far more flavor in a cup. So I urge you, don't pull on a machine, you're only gonna be a day closer to getting a tech visit to make sure that you fix your seal or stop a leak. Myth number four, the more coffee I jam in my basket, the stronger it's gonna be. Well, that's not correct. It's a bit similar to the last point. What people used to do is they'd fill their basket right up to the top, they'd give it a bit of a tamp, and they'd be jamming in as hard as they possibly could because the coffee is actually hitting that shower screen all the way through. It's definitely not what you wanna do. What will happen is you'll tend to then grind coarser so that the water actually flows through, and all you're doing is underextracting a bigger amount of coffee, and you're actually going to waste more coffee and get a poorer result. So make sure you get your dose right, have less in the basket, allow that water to come in, brew beautifully and expand because once coffee gets water under it, it will actually expand out, it'll get to full saturation, and then it'll brew through. And that's how you're gonna get a much better tasting espresso. Now in my quick wrap up, I've got a couple of final little barista pro tips for you. I didn't wanna go too crazy down this path yet because there's so much on this topic, and we've got videos to dive deeper into this. But the first thing that you wanna consider is to be buying regular fresh beans. Try and find a roast date on a bag, and then try and use beans not too fresh. Something between seven and 30 days is gonna be great. If it's too fresh, you might actually find it tastes bitter, but really there's a lot of carbon dioxide still in there that's really making your mouth taste and be a bit funny. If you go past 30 days, all the beautiful flavors, the florals, the sweetness has really died off, and you're just gonna get this strong coffee taste. Clean your coffee machine before you put your next new beans in. Now I know we're always in a hurry to reload that grinder and get ourself the next cup of coffee. But if you take the moment to actually clean the machine, you're gonna enjoy the beans the best, and you'll start to make adjustments based off the new beans, not the old ones that you had in there. So a lot of people try and do their machine once a month or once a week or whatever it might be, but we all miss that. So if you start with a clean machine before you put new beans in, you're gonna have a beautiful coffee. Just remember, if you put chemical in your machine, make sure you don't drink the first coffee because we do wanna get rid of any residue that you may not have removed in your water flushing. Taste your espresso and make adjustments based off that. Now, no matter what I tell you about a recipe, a grind, a bean or whatever it is, you have to enjoy the taste. So if you can start to document what recipe you've done and then make a couple of notes about what you liked or didn't like about the coffee, you'll start to build yourself a catalogue of different flavours and start to see what you enjoy or what you start to change based off your taste. Now, don't expect you to be the best cupper, which is someone that assesses raw coffee or a green grater, that can do this really, really well, but you have your own palette. You know what you like, you know what you don't like, and just starting to get a little diary and a record of that is going to build your knowledge as you grow with your coffee extractions. Now you've got some of the basics, there is so much more to happen in the puck preparation. Now, I've steered away from this because I wanted to keep it nice and simple for this video, but we've got a lot of content on it. Knowing the fundamentals of a recipe is the start and having your dose, your yield and your time locked in to then start to look how you can improve it. Now, there's a lot of acronyms that get thrown around like WDT, RDT, NCT and a whole other ones because what they're talking about is getting that coffee to not channel, to have the water flow through totally perfect. Now, I want you to look further in those ones and you'll do a much better extraction once you start to learn it, but get the basics and then you can tackle these other things when you're a little bit more refined and repeatable in your processes. All right, so I hope that's helped you understand how to get better espresso at home. Now, coffee is, it's a patient's game. It takes a bit of time. You've got to put a bit of benefit in, but you'll get the rewards in your palate. So I urge you to start to enjoy it, take a little bit of time and start to investigate the things you can do better to make a better espresso. And before long, you'll be pulling cafe quality espresso shots in your home for yourself, your family and all your friends and they'll only be more impressed to come around and have a coffee with you. So if you've got any other questions, hey, pop them in the comments down below. I'm happy to answer those ones. There are plenty of other videos on our channel to be able to help you with that. If you get the downloadable guide, every single page has a QR code to a very specific video covering a lot more of the topics I've just glossed over a little bit really in that booklet. So that'll help you reference those as well. But anyway, thanks very much for watching everyone. I hope you enjoy better coffee next time. I'll catch you soon. Cheers. Peace.