Pulled the trigger on a CC1/Vario package after hemming and hawing for a couple of weeks looking at the BDB/Silvano/etc. alternatives. Time to go coffee shopping. My plan is to buy a large amount, 10 pounds or so, and freeze ~100-150g portions (I have a chamber vac that I use for sous vide cooking and a FoodSaver vacuum, I'll probably use the latter for beans). I figure that while I'm learning, even if it's not my ideal coffee it will let me get to know my grinder and machine.

My preference, I think, is for more 'old-school' espresso - my nearest legit coffee shop is the highly regarded Avoca in Fort Worth but the last couple of shots I've had from there were very bright and almost unpleasantly sour. I gather that this can be the norm with 'third-wave' coffee shops.

I'm weighing the Intelligentsia Black Cat Analog, Red Bird Espresso and Nossa Full Cycle. Do any of these stand out as a good beginner blend and/or any recommendations for another option to try?

Only your taste will tell you what you'll like best. Why not buy a small bag of each, get the roaster's recommendation of how much to age them to peak and the recommended brew temperature? You can brew them via pourover or immersion to see which you prefer. You'll try to reproduce the brew flavor as espresso. Otherwise you'll just get our opinions and they may not match what you like.

It's like people don't even try to look for an answer. I found this on the 2nd page of this board

Good coffee to learn with

Sorry, that was actually the primary source of the three I listed - I thought I'd solicit more possibilities.

re: smaller batches, my take from various beginner threads was that just learning to nail down a proper grind and tamp can take a bit, I was thinking that sticking to one coffee for the first while would help me get the basics down, rather than getting through 12 oz or a pound of something and then going through the process again.

I'm actually headed to Portland for a conference this week, my hotel is right by the Nossa cafe (and Stumptown and a couple of others) so I should be able to taste a few.

milosz wrote:
I'm actually headed to Portland for a conference this week, my hotel is right by the Nossa cafe (and Stumptown and a couple of others) so I should be able to taste a few.

Fantastic. Tasting how the roaster pulls the shot will help immensely. My local roaster does this and it gives a solid starting point. Most of the problem with newbies is understanding what great espresso should taste like.

Don't worry about pegging down what you think you'll like. Today it might taste sour and bright. Later on it might taste refined and complex. Most of us here also started looking for chocolate type flavors but this is mostly dependent on roast level instead of bean origin I think.

milosz wrote: I'm weighing the Intelligentsia Black Cat Analog, Red Bird Espresso and Nossa Full Cycle. Do any of these stand out as a good beginner blend and/or any recommendations for another option to try?

Red Bird Espresso has been one of my favorite comfort coffees over the past few years, and I'm enjoying some Full Cycle right now. They're more alike than different, and both are very good. It's been years since I've had Analog, so can't help you there.

Others you might consider are Mountain Air Roasting Black Balsam or their American Espresso. I recommend ordering 12-16 oz of each of the above, a week apart, and get to know them really well before you get a ton of something to freeze. You'll find which one(s) you like most, and if you find you like a couple for different reasons, you can get 5 lb of each and alternate as you wish.

milosz wrote:I'm actually headed to Portland for a conference this week, my hotel is right by the Nossa cafe (and Stumptown and a couple of others) so I should be able to taste a few.

Nossa is a good one to try. Just down the street from them is Barista, where they carry coffees from several roasters. Usually that includes Coava, which is local. Just across the border into Washington you'll find Compass Coffee, and if you go to their St. John's Road store you can visit with Mike McGinnis, their roastmaster and frequent participant on H-B. Their Delirium blend is another to consider.

I like the idea of switching between 5 lb. bags of different blends or trying a smaller bag of different blends from week to week. This will be more interesting than 10 lbs. of one, no matter how much you like it.

Klatch Belle and WBE are excellent coffees for skill building. They're fairly easy, without being quite as forgiving as Redbird Espresso or Stumptown Hair Bender, but they have a little more going on. I'm not familiar with Nossa. Intelligentisa left me in the dust long ago and I haven't tried any of the current iterations of Black Cat.

If you're starting from scratch, Go with Hair Bender or Redbird. Another of Redbird's many virtues is that it's very inexpensive as really good blends go.

You're going to go through a lot of coffee at first, or at leas you should be; but there's no need to buy in bulk. The "best use" freshness window for espresso is somewhere between eight and fourteen days, which begins after the coffee has had enough post-roast time to rest. For a medium roast blend, you're generally looking at five or six days post-roast before the window opens. In other words, unless you're balancing shipping costs against the inconvenience of storing in the freezer, there's no need to buy more coffee than you think you'll use in a couple of weeks.

The essence of improving your barista skills (which includes starting at zero) is learning to taste.

What you really want to shoot for in the beginning is a "balanced" extraction. That is, one which is neither under nor over extracted. Under extracted coffees taste sour, over extracted coffees taste bitter.

You control the level of extraction with distribution, tamping, temperature, grind, dose, time, flow rate, output, brew ratio and the visual representations of extraction level.

When you're just starting out, it's helpful to remove dose as a variable, by consistently dosing the maximum height in the basket allowed by a coin test, weighing the dose, and staying with that weight (unless and until grind size forces you to change it). That restricts your variables to the other nine thousand things. Sound complicated? It's a lot to manage at first.

You NEED a scale for dose AND output. Measuring output by volume is too inconsistent because espresso density is dependent on a number of contingencies not all of which controllable or predictable. Brew ratio -- dose weight/output weight, expressed as a ratio or quotient -- is more than a helpful way of understanding what's going on, it's definitional.

Once you've learned to taste and pull a balanced extraction, the next step is getting the coffee to reveal as much of the bean's character as possible.

Rich