The REAL Reason Your Home Espresso Tastes So Bad It s not the Coffee Machine It s YOU

So you've got your coffee machine at home and you think it's faulty. You've been playing with the grind, you're going coarser, finer, and you just can't get the extractions to come out, it's all messy. Yeah, sometimes it's good, other times it's bad. Okay, yeah, it sounds like a bit of a common issue that we do hear a lot. They just don't know how to make coffee. Yeah, it's okay, it's a problem, I think I can help you with. Another one. I can't believe I just got out of another funny moment that just keeps happening to us. The amount of times that people actually buy equipment and actually don't know how to use it. They really can't grasp how to make the basic essentials of coffee and they genuinely think there's a problem with the coffee machine or the grinder. Well, the reality is there's usually nothing wrong with that coffee machine or grinder. It is you. It's the person who doesn't know how to make coffee. But that's okay, I'm here to help you. I'm going to cover the most common things that I have to deal with each day when someone does buy a brand new beautiful Italian-made machine and they want to try and fix the broken faulty machine that they've just been tearing their hair out. Because there's some simple things that if you're going to make coffee at home that you need to understand so you can actually have a great result that would be akin to or very similar to what you can pay for in a cafe. So there are four key areas that I'm going to cover today that will help you understand how to progress from your machine out of the box to having a great coffee. And look, please take this with no arrogance. I really want you to be understanding of that. You've got to learn, you've got to understand the different areas that you need to control or change when you're making great coffee. So the first area they're going to be looking at is the setup of your equipment. The second is going to be knowing what a recipe is and how to actually adjust that for coffee. The third is understanding your produce. The beans, understanding how well they work. And number four, some of the skills you need and the myth-busting around making coffee at home. So the first one is setting up your home machine. A lot of people think that you can just take a coffee machine out of the box, plonk it on the bench, plug it in, put a bit of water in, you know, get your grinder, put the hopper on, throw some beans in, hit a button, put the coffee in the group handle, lock it in, and if you hit go, you should have a fantastic coffee. Well, the reality is it is so far from that. What actually happens when you buy a machine here at Artistic Coffee? If you're in our shop and display room here, I won't let you take it home. We will always do about an hour and a half session with you dialing in the grinder, getting the machine ready, and actually showing you how to make coffee. Because it's always that Friday afternoon where someone says, I really want the machine and I want to have it for the weekend. And we've been reluctant to let them have it, but they said, No, I need it. It's my friend's birthday. We give it to them. They get through the weekend and they're ringing us on Monday saying it was terrible. The coffee wasn't great. They didn't impress their friends and it was a really poor outcome. Because machines do need to be set up. And a lot of machines have a whole range of different features that you could use. But as a beginner, they are just things you shouldn't play with. It actually makes coffee and understanding how to make coffee really, really hard. So when you're looking at your grinder, we talk about setting up from a zero point. Now, we've got some specific videos on that one as well. But what you've got to do is you've got to make sure you don't clamp a bean in between your burrs as you're setting it up for the first time. If you get a bean stuck in between the two burrs, essentially, you can't go finer and you'll be grinding at a super coarse setting. And that's going to be a really, really poor outcome when you're trying to extract coffee. It's the same as when you're actually trying to clean out your grinder as well. So check out that video and that's going to help you understand some of the issues you could cause. From a brand new grinder out of the box, if you do this, you can burn out your motor and it will not be covered under warranty. At the grinder, go as fine as you possibly can. And once those burrs start to touch each other, a little bit of a chirping sound might happen. You will then go back a quarter to half a turn and then you'll be pretty close to start dialing in for your first espresso. And at that distance in the burr set, whether that be conical or flat burr, a bean shouldn't get jammed in there causing the issue. It'll probably be a little bit coarse and then you'll have to make your way a little bit finer to dial in your perfect recipe. When you get your brand new coffee machine, you're going to have to obviously, yeah, put the water in, get it heated up. But you really need to make sure you have a hot ready group handle. A cold handle is going to give you a really poor outcome. You've probably been in a cafe and seen that handle sitting on the drip tray. It's like the biggest sin or issue you can have. So make sure your handle's hot and ready. Have the machine set to all the standard parameters. Don't start playing with flow control, pre-infusions, variable temperatures, or all these other different things that can happen in how you actually saturate your puck of coffee. You just want to have it at full nine bars, a set temperature of water at about 94 degrees, and then start to extract coffee. Start to analyze some of the results and then go back and make changes. Too many people play with all the settings and they think that the settings are going to make the coffee better. And same with their grinder. They think going coarser, finer is going to make all these great outcomes. But it's not. The reality is the difference between the grind that you have in your group handle that comes from your grinder and the outcome after you press that button on your coffee machine needs to be measured. And you have to have an understanding of what changes you're going to make to make it better. Too many people don't understand how much coffee goes in a basket. And because their mate said something about go finer or go coarser, they start to play. And you can get really lost in this. If you've got a grinder that has a time-based setting, which allows it to be four, five, or six seconds when you press a button to give you the right amount of dose, you have to understand that you have to dial that in to the grind setting so that when you hit the button, you actually get the right amount of grind in your portafilter to fill it all the way up properly. If you're not going to do that or spend the time in it, you're always going to have a poor outcome. And when you do actually get an extraction that comes out reasonably okay, people start to play with their grinder to get it better. But every time you make a change on your grinder, there is grind on the other outer side of the burrs in the chute that will then be falling into your portafilter. You have to purge that out. You're going to have half old grind and half new grind in the next handle that you're going to make. And then you'll go and extract that coffee and form an impression about what you should do. But the reality is you're half old grind, half new grind. You make another change and you're continually never going to have one full dose of accurate grind that you're going to be assessing. Number two, understanding what a recipe is for coffee. Now, I'm going to help you out. On the screen here, I'm going to pop up our basic recipe guide. And if you have a look, there are three main sizes or shapes of coffee baskets. One has a large cone on it. One has a straight wall, then a little bit of a cone, and then another basket that is a straight wall all the way down. There are three sort of standard baskets that are across the industry. These are usually going to be about 9 grams, 14 to 18 grams, or 21 or 22 grams in the big baskets. The recipe guide here allows you to understand what a normal or a ristretto is in terms of how much coffee you should be putting in that basket and how much you should be extracting in yield once you've pressed that button. We need to weigh how much grind is in that basket. We need to weigh the liquid that ends up in the cup. And we need to time how long that takes to actually achieve the end result of the yield that we want in the cup. That is the recipe that forms the standard that you need to make time and time again on your coffee machine. It does take a little bit of time to adjust this. You do have to play with the little beans when you're setting up your grinder. Now the one thing a lot of people do is they get a coffee machine, they get a kilo of beans, they have this play, and they literally waste a whole kilo of beans trying to get a good coffee. So it is best to maybe buy a little bit more coffee when you do get your machine for the first time. It is pretty common for people to burn through beans because they just don't understand what's going on. You don't want to finally get to the point where you've actually got it nailed and you've only got one or two coffees left and it's not enough for the coffee the next day. Because when you go and buy another bag of beans, that is going to be another whole range of issues you're going to have to dial in for to have the same outcome. You just wasted a whole kilo chasing that perfect grind. So a couple of tools you do need would be a dosing pot and a set of scales to make sure that you can standardise the grind that goes into your portafilter handle. Using that chart, we can guesstimate how much coffee should fill that basket. So our standard recipe is normally 22.5 grams in the really big basket, a one-to-one ratio, which is called a ristretto, means we're going to pass one part of water to one part of coffee into our cup, which will be our yield. If we've got 22.5 grams of coffee in the top, we need 22.5 grams in our cup. That is our one-to-one or ristretto, which we can also call a single shot because we don't typically split our baskets out the two spouts into two different cups. You can if you like, it's just going to be a weaker cup and not what your local cafe is going to be doing. If you're looking for a double shot, perhaps, if we use that as a pretty general term, we call it an ormal, which is a two-to-one ratio, two parts of water to one part coffee. We're going to run more water through the same amount of coffee and then we're going to get the yield of 45 grams. We're looking to get that in about 30 seconds. Now, the key here is we're not going to be changing more or less coffee or changing the grind to make coffee stronger or weaker. We're not going to tamp harder on that coffee puck. All of that needs to be standardised. The only one thing that you want to change is the size of your grind, which in turn will actually increase or decrease the time of your extraction. If you're finding the coffee is coming out really, really quick, let's say under 20 seconds, you need to go finer to increase the time that the water will flow through the finer grinds. If it's going through really long, say 35 seconds or more, you need to increase the grind size so the water can flow quicker through that grind bed and end up at a lower time to get your yield. Now, I know we're partway through and you're thinking, gee, that's a lot to take in. Well, we've helped everybody out when they buy a coffee machine from Artisti Coffee. There's a couple of manuals here. You might have seen them. We've talked about them before, but this is our home barista manual for more basic machines and you get that free with every machine that you buy from Artisti. If you've got a more higher-end machine, we did do this guide for the Lomazocco range, so the Pico grinder, the Micra or the Mini or any other high-end machine. This one dives a little bit deeper into a lot more of the topics. So these are available on our web store. Jump onto them, grab them. They can be downloadable PDFs, so we can ship those all over the world, but they are going to help you step by step take you through all of these different things I'm talking about now and it's going to get you started a lot quicker. The manual that comes with the coffee machine thinks about the coffee machine itself, how to turn it on, how to maybe make the buttons work or the settings. It never factors in a grinder, the coffee or the types of coffee that you're trying to make, so you can really get lost. A lot of people say, yeah, I've got the manual and the manual was the one that came with the coffee machine. They didn't download the one that we gave them free. So once people open this up and read through it, you get way ahead really quickly and it solves most of the problems. A new scoop? No, it's not new scoops. Some coffee machines give you a scoop. It's the biggest trap you can fall into. No scoop's the same. When you change grind particle size, you're going to have a varying amount of coffee in here by gram weight, especially if you're trying to use the same amount. So get rid of the scoop. Buy a set of scales and you won't fall into that trap of one scoop, two scoop or whatever it might be. It's just not going to help you make a great cup of coffee. Number three, it's understanding your produce. Your produce is a coffee bean and a coffee bean is a fresh product, okay? It comes from a tree. It's just the same as a banana or other fruits that you need to understand the age and the cycle that it goes through and when it will actually start to deteriorate. So understanding your produce is such a big part that in our manual, we actually put the age cycle of beans and the expansion and how beans work before even the general explanation of what a coffee machine is and the parts and the identification charts because it's actually so important. And a lot of people don't realise that coffee does age, it expands differently, tastes differently and at some point it will actually lose a lot of its characteristics. So this little chart here, we'll chuck it up on the screen for you so you do have a bit of a guide as well but basically between the first six days, coffee from a roast date has a lot of gas in it, a lot of CO2 and it actually expands a lot in your coffee basket when you put water on top of it. Now that can cause lots of issues in terms of choking your shot, slowing your extraction down and then people think, oh, I've got to change my grind or I need to, you know, lower my dose. So it's a bit of a false way of making changes when you don't need to. If your grind starts to flow, then actually starts to slow down or even drip and then it actually starts to flow again, that's because your coffee puck has expanded, it got total saturation, the water came through but then it's expanded again to actually slow down that flow and then it reaches a more saturated point and allows that flow to come all the way through. So that's a real easy thing to know what's happening in your coffee puck. Fresh coffee also, when you're looking at your spouts and it's coming into a cup, can be formed by big bubbles that are coming out. So if you're seeing those bubble, that's the gas that needs to come out of your beans so it can be a bit trickier when you're trying to extract coffee. So we recommend coffee at least from 7 or ideally 10 days up to 21 days. It hits a peak where basically the gas is out of the beans, the acidity, the sweetness, the body and all the flavors actually start to balance really nicely. When you get into this time frame between that 7 and 21 days, you have to make far less grind adjustments. With our cafe partners, we try and get them to use the coffee in that window from week 2 up to week 3 and it means a Monday coffee tastes like a Monday coffee and a Friday is like a Friday. It doesn't change because we keep giving them different age coffee. That flavor change is noticeable but if you're the kind of person that goes to a cafe on every Monday, you probably won't notice it but if you went back on a Friday, you would probably think a little bit more stronger, a little bit more bolder perhaps and that's just the produce aging and the gas coming out of that. Once you go past about 28 to 30 days, coffee loses all its subtle flavors, there's no more gas in there and essentially you just get coffee that tastes like coffee. One monotone flavor, generally heavy body and maybe a toffee flavor but you're losing any subtle notes in that. It also won't expand much so if you've been using a dose of 22.5 grams let's say, you will have to actually increase the dose because the coffee will not expand when water is added to it. That will also affect whether you have to go coarser or finer to reach your desired extraction recipe. To help our customers, we always give them free coffee. You buy a machine, you get some beans. We do recommend people stick with the same coffee for the first 3 months of buying their home machine because that way you get to understand the produce, understand how it's expanding, the grind changes you might need to make. When you've got a hot sunny day at home and the sun might be beaming down on your beans, changing how they're reacting or drying them out more or a really wet day where there's a lot of humidity in the air perhaps, all of these factors change how your recipe is going to work. Your barista in your local cafe is monitoring these and manage them day in day out and so you've really been spoiled about these changes, probably not noticing them over time. But that's the skill that they do have and it's a skill you can learn and I urge you to understand them. By not changing beans readily, especially in the early stages of you understanding how to create your recipe, your dose, your yield and your time, you won't have to change between roast profiles. So a lighter roast or a darker roast, these all need some slight changes to recipes. If you're going to a lighter roast, you want to have a hotter temperature because they're more dense and it's harder to get the flavouring out of the beans but also because they're lighter roast, they're actually going to take longer to age so the gas might be around a little bit longer as well. If you're going a darker roast and those beans are oily and they're covered in like a bit of an oil slick, you're already way past any sort of expansion. So that can be another challenge that you're going to have to deal with. You'll probably find they'll be bitter no matter what you do if you've got the oil on those beans. But if you're jumping between fresh roast, old roast, light roast, dark roast and all these different types and thinking, oh why is my coffee crazy and I can't get any consistency, it's because you don't understand the produce. So come back, look at the age of coffee, look at a recipe and start again and just buy those same beans consistently for a few weeks or a month to being more consistent in your coffee extractions. Number four, your skills and the myth busting. There's so many times that when we start a training session, people start telling me these things and you know, I tamp harder or put more coffee in or, you know, they've got all these questions that they've heard from different people or their mates told them or whatever it might be. And I find myself saying, okay, okay, they want to download, that's fine. And then I respectfully say, hey, okay, I hear what the problems you're having but I can take you through a systematic way to actually make great coffee. We grab the manual, we start from the start and we work through. And when we get to the end, there isn't a question that they have because we've actually covered it all. That is something that I really urge you to do. Work through the book, work through a manual, have a way to start and, you know, develop each step to better espresso and creating a better milk-based coffee as well. It's best not to change too many variables. And I said this at the start about the equipment. Equipment has a lot of different features. Temperature control, which is the water on top of your coffee or it could be the temperature of your steam. You could have too much pressure or not enough pressure in your boiler. So when you're frothing, you're either getting a good bubble or a good silky milk or you're getting this big bubbly mess. But if you start to change the temperatures in your boilers, you're going to be varying what happens there. So if you can start with a lower temperature on your boiler, it might take a little bit longer to make that milk, but it should be a much better quality. And with your extractions, if you're going to be changing your water temperatures constantly, you're going to get a totally different result every single time you extract. If your machine has flow control, if you start to play with temperature and flow control, so that is not using the nine bar pressure of a coffee machine, where you may reduce that down to either one particular setting, which may be six or three. Some machines actually allow you to go totally variable, up or down. Every time you change that variability, you're changing a pressure on top of that coffee puck. The extraction time, the yield is going to be totally way out and your recipe is going to have to be customized for exactly the process that you're doing. So if you've got a machine with flow control, don't use it for the first six months. You're only going to get totally lost and make poor coffee. Just stick to nine bar, get used to making great extractions and then have a small tweak. Maybe a little bit of three bar, then up to nine and just leave it at that. Now that's replicating something like we call pre-infusion. Now this is a huge topic and a lot of people don't quite understand it. There's pre-wet, pre-infusion, pre-soak, all these other different things that are called, but basically it's whether we're introducing water to a coffee puck to allow it to expand and then removing any sort of pressure so there's not more water on that actual coffee and then adding more to it. Me personally, I love a little bit of pre-infusion. There's a whole video I put on the E61 style group levers from the Italian machines. Have a look at it. It'll teach you how to use a little bit of pre-infusion on those machines. If you've got some settings on other machines with pre-infusion, don't have them really long. Maybe just have one second of pre-infusion and then look to increase that. A lot of machines have this huge number of pre-infusion, five, six, eight, nine seconds and then they start their extraction and that can be really tricky when you're starting out. So turn them off and then create a baseline and make one little change and see how you go. A lower dose in my coffee basket is going to give me a weaker coffee. No, that is not correct and more coffee jamming it into a coffee basket is going to give me a stronger coffee. That's not correct either because you're not considering how much water you're actually passing through that coffee bed. You're just thinking I jam more in there, it's going to slow it down or speed it up and that's going to give me more or less flavor. It's not the case. We need to be consistent in the amount of coffee that's there, adjust the grind and then only put more or less water through that grind bed. So if we're going to put less through it, it'll be a more milder espresso like we call a one-to-one, a ristretto. If we double the amount of water to coffee, we're going to get a two-to-one which is going to give us a wider range of flavors because we're going to get that intensity that we get from the one-to-one which is the ristretto, more sweetness and a little bit more body into it and as more water flavor starts to come out, we start to get the tail end or lower things that are extracting out of that coffee. You can actually go further to a three-to-one which is a lungo and that takes it really into what we call a bit more bitterness but if you combine all those together, you get a very different flavor as well. The lungo is not something we use here in Australia but I know it does happen in America and some other overseas countries. So, you know, good to mention it but it's not really what we do serve here in Australian cafes. Touching back a little bit to understanding your produce, bean roast dates, not a batch date. Get the bag, turn it around, have a look and see if you actually have a roasted on date, not a best before date. A best before date could be 12 months. Coffee is never going to make you sick if it lasts a really long time so sometimes they have a very long used by date but finding that roast date and understanding when it was roasted and how it's going to expand when water is added to it as I was talking earlier is going to change your coffee game. Once you've worked out how much coffee you use in either a week or a fortnight or a month and get yourself on some sort of coffee subscription or a regular buying cycle so that you can always get coffee landing in that exact window of the coffee you enjoy, you're not going to have to worry about changing grind or your dose or any of these other factors that we're talking about because you're actually buying the beans and getting them to match the age of the coffee. Some people say, hey, you know what? I bought these beans and they've been perfect for my machine the whole time. It's some fluke that they managed to set up their machine based off that coffee that they were getting. It could have been really old, really aged and for some reason they just happened to have the grinder set where it needed to be so good luck to you but if you go changing beans you won't truly understand how to make the changes for that particular coffee. The other one is my grinder won't grind fine enough. Now, it's funny how often this happens. Some people go and buy a brand new coffee grinder and a brand new coffee machine and that grinder will not grind fine enough for the machine that they've purchased. It's usually because they went and bought a cheap grinder, a very entry-level model and then they maybe spent $2,000, $3,000 on an Italian home machine. It just won't match very well. The grinder is a variable in its particle size when it does grind. We're going to have things like fines, super fines, rocks, pebbles and boulders. We're going to have a whole range of different actual grind particles that allow the coffee flow to be variable. And straight out of the box, some of these grinders do need to be adjusted. You need to pull them apart, either put a washer in or change how those burrs sit to actually make it work. They're fine for a comparable coffee machine. Now, I don't want to try and, you know, peg in certain brands here or something but if you've got a coffee machine from an appliance store and you've got the matching grinder to it, they may work really well together but the minute that you try and upgrade to a better coffee machine, that grinder simply won't do the job. It's really common. People don't understand that you need to spend a good amount of money on a grinder to match the type of coffee machine that you have. The grinder does all the work. There's so many videos and times out there that people are saying buy a much better grinder. You'll have it for a lot longer time. It could even surpass two or three coffee machines as you grow in your progression there as well if you buy yourself a really good grinder and spend at least one third as a minimum of the cost of your coffee machine to the grinder. So your skills, you need to develop on your skills. If you just think you're going to put beans in, a grinder, push a button, grind it, tamp it, chuck it in and that's all you want to do, you're probably best to go and buy a fully automated coffee machine. Don't buy a separate grinder and a separate machine. If you're not willing to put a little bit of time and effort into making a coffee, a little bit goes such a long way in making a great coffee. Spend some time developing your skills. Once you've worked something out, do a bit of research. Understand how you can be better at making a better coffee puck. There are things like WDT which is little needling tools, an NCD or a distributor and a lot of other tools in that space that will have a huge impact to how you actually get a much better flavor of espresso in your cup. Now before I wrap it up, I want to prove something to you. Go and check out our latest Google reviews. They're going to be people that would say we've had a terrible outcome on our machine. We bought a brand new machine, couldn't make coffee. These are the people that are on our chat or have sent us an email saying, I might want a refund. This thing's just not working. It's not doing what I thought it would do. But then read through that comment a little bit further and you'll see that they've connected with us. We've taken them through one of these home courses through a Zoom session and now they're actually making fantastic coffee and they're so appreciative of that understanding. So when you're trying to go buy a brand new machine, make sure you consider training. If you're buying from us locally or interstate, come and see us. We'll do a training session with you because we want you to have that great experience. If you buy a machine from somewhere else, download this manual. Understand it. Maybe download it before you buy a machine. It's probably going to point out a few of the things that you should look at when you're buying your next coffee machine. Well, I hope that helps you understand what you need to consider once you've got your new machine home. Thanks very much for your support too in buying coffee all over the world now. So you can buy from Canada and US using our artisticcoffee.co site. So jump on there and buy some beans. You can actually buy coffee now to our New Zealand friends over the gap. Go to artistic.co.nz and we'll happily ship you some coffee there. Anyway, I hope this has helped you. So please share it with a friend who's got a brand new machine. You might be able to solve all of their problems with this video. And if you haven't yet, please do like and subscribe. It really does help us grow with the channel. Thanks very much for watching. We'll catch you next time. Cheers.