4 Barrel Friendo Blendo
5.5oz cup

Nice balance. Chocolate dominates, but there is some really nice pomegranate acidity, good "sparkly" cardamom spice notes and interesting stone fruit flavours. Not a super sweet flavoured espresso. Works really well in short milk like this.

Colorful pants

As usual I use The Coffee Collective espresso blend (something like 19 days old today) using an 8 oz cup

Espresso

58% Daterra Sweet Collection, Brazil
23% Finca Vista Hermosa, Guatemala
19% idido, Aricha, Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia

Sweet and full bodied. Clean and balanced. Marzipan and chocolate. High notes of strawberries.
The three components of this espresso blend have each been grown with meticulous carefulness resulting in a very clean cup. Combined with our light roast profiles for each component we achieve a very low bitterness.
The espresso is oily and creamy with a caramelly sweetness balanced by a delicate berry-like acidity that gives a sense of life and freshness in the coffee. In the aromas you'll find the natural notes of marzipan, chocolate and fully ripe strawberries.

In order to have the most freshly poured drink with me to the breakfast table, the milk were steamed after the shot were made and the group cleaned.

Awful. I got a bag (1 kg) of Segafredo Casa. It didn't smell nice but i soldiered on. First i tried it in the Peppina. It looked great. But the taste was awful, no matter what i did. Then i tried it in the Brikka, which tasted awful as well. I figured that although i still had the moka and drip to try the specific awfullness wouldn't go away so i gave up. I now have 900 grams of disgusting coffee.
It's hard to explain the taste. There was body, and it was rather creamy. It wasn't overly bitter or sour. I couldn't discern really standout tastes. I just wanted to never drink it ever again. I stared at Sweet Maria's flavor wheel for a while but i do not know half of the tastes described (carvacrol?) so i gave up. All i know is that something, somewhere went horribly wrong and that coffee was involved.

I looked at the beans and some where dark black and some where about as brown as Beyonce (Sasha Fierce?). Some beans had holes in them. Some where chipped. All where very small.

If anyone ever gets a bag of this stuff, throw it away. Don't even use it to season your grinder. Yuck.

pretty good i got up at 5am or so to go into the coffeehouse to change out a fitting on the left hand solenoid of the LM2 which had a small leak after I switched out the entire valve assembly yesterday and found the new fitting's seat didn't seem to match up enough with the older tubing seat so I pulled the old fitting off and replaced it and it worked so I was pleased and needed to pull a few sets of espresso to test the fit which worked out fine and at that point I came on home and fired up the LM GS1 and am toasting a couple of the fresh bagels from the bakery and enjoying a third or fourth double this morning and thinking everything looks pretty good from where I sit. Maybe its the 5th or 6th double.
Bernie

bernie wrote:pretty good i got up at 5am or so to go into the coffeehouse to change out a fitting on the left hand solenoid of the LM2 which had a small leak after I switched out the entire valve assembly yesterday and found the new fitting's seat didn't seem to match up enough with the older tubing seat so I pulled the old fitting off and replaced it and it worked so I was pleased and needed to pull a few sets of espresso to test the fit which worked out fine and at that point I came on home and fired up the LM GS1 and am toasting a couple of the fresh bagels from the bakery and enjoying a third or fourth double this morning and thinking everything looks pretty good from where I sit.

Wow, bernie, you must have been pulling some very short shots today and needed to compose that very looooooong sentence to balance them out.

Last night I finally completed setting up Speedster with the automatic profiling pump. This morning's shots were spent playing around with that. Black Cat, ~200F, ~14g coffee, ~18g espresso. Fairly sweet, malty, with a hint of mint. A nice morning.

Jacob wrote:In order to have the most freshly poured drink with me to the breakfast table, the milk were steamed after the shot were made and the group cleaned.

small rant

milk can wait for espresso - espresso cannot wait for milk.

seriously people.

what he said.

AndyS wrote:Wow, bernie, you must have been pulling some very short shots today and needed to compose that very looooooong sentence to balance them out.

Last night I finally completed setting up Speedster with the automatic profiling pump. This morning's shots were spent playing around with that. Black Cat, ~200F, ~14g coffee, ~18g espresso. Fairly sweet, malty, with a hint of mint. A nice morning.

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What a beauty. I do think the shots were short. So I'm balancing this evening with a nice Merlot.
Bernie

malachi wrote:small rant

milk can wait for espresso - espresso cannot wait for milk.

seriously people.

The alternative, the way I prepare most of my drinks, is to do milk and coffee side by side! But milk based drinks made for myself and for max survivability at a table, I like to steam 'Just In Time' and a little hotter (I usually keep my steaming on the cold side). I probably have a few other quirks to

I generally enjoy comfort food espresso in the morning, something like Klatch's Belle Espresso blend in a cappuccino.

malachi wrote:milk can wait for espresso - espresso cannot wait for milk.

Great in theory, not so sure about practice:
1) Single boilers (like Silvia): you're screwed either way. Thermal brew stability is lousy immediately after steaming, but there's an unacceptable delay to heat up to steam temp and froth after brewing.
2) HX and DB: frothing 3-4oz of milk generally only takes 10-20 seconds. How important is that in a cappuccino? If you're making a big gulp latte, the milk will take longer to froth, but espresso nuances will certainly get lost. So either way, I don't think it really matters.

Outstanding! The Ritual Fazenda Esperença made several heavenly shots in a row at 198.6ish, using a mildly updosed ridged LM double basket and pulling 1.7 oz. or so... full bodied fruit and dusty chocolate and just a hint of spice... I couldn't stop and now I'm a bit wired.

Most enjoyable:

25% India robusta roasted at Paradise 2/9 but fresh still thanks to the freezer

and blue batak a la Peet's (25%) rounded out with my roast of SM El Salvador Orange bourbon (50%)

I like the fruit, tobacco and spice in that combo.

Thursday evening I roasted a half pound of the Organic Yirga Cheffe that SM was selling about a year ago (I bought 5 lbs at the time, and this is just about the last of it). Took it just barely into SC, and had the first shot of it this morning. Since I'm using the Synchrony until I get the Caravel and hand grinder in a couple of weeks, I don't have a lot of control (as in, virtually none), so I get what I get, but it's still pretty good. Just cleaned and descaled yesterday, plus did a couple extra rinse cycles on the brew path (because, like an idiot, I forgot to warm up the machine before starting the descale, so when I turned it on, it rinsed the brew path with Dezcal. No apparent harm done, but I wanted to make extra sure it was all out), so it's probably the best shot the thing is capable of doing. And it was worth it. I'm looking forward to getting the Caravel and making all the newbie mistakes, but this was still pretty damn good coffee.

RapidCoffee wrote:HX and DB: frothing 3-4oz of milk generally only takes 10-20 seconds. How important is that in a cappuccino? If you're making a big gulp latte, the milk will take longer to froth, but espresso nuances will certainly get lost. So either way, I don't think it really matters.

And the espresso is degrading for that 10 to 20 seconds.
Milk won't degrade in that time.
So... why would you do that? Why god why?!?!

Entertainment value?

I just don't find that 20 seconds makes much difference in a milk drink, especially when I'm stumbling around the first thing in the morning. But I'll happily concede that your taste buds are far more refined than mine when it comes to espresso.

Overslept, and did not have time for my espresso

It's going to be a long day.

Excellent! Started off by sharing a 5c vac pot of Pt's light roasted Sidamo Special Prep with my wife. Followed that with a 14g shot of their Espresso Roast Sidamo @ 91C & the sweet taste is still lingering over an hour later!

Good morning! Ethiopian Yrgacheffe (home roasted) in a cafe americano, some pancakes and eggs. I usually roast in small batches and consume the coffee within 5 days. I only made it to day 4 with this batch. Cup was very clear, smooth body and that light berry finish you get from the Yrgacheffe. A great way to start the week!

Don

My last 3 mornings has been truely inspirational - I'm well into a pound of the Black Cat Single Origin Espresso - Sumatra, Lake Tawar. Intelly describes it as:

"This espresso is truly unique, exhibiting wonderful, deep cedar and tobacco notes with a top layer of crisp grapefruit. A very short and slow extraction brings out incredible creaminess and depth"

I would agree, this shot taste like no other that I've yet to have, it is EXTREMELY refreshing! For all you looking for a nice change of flavor (i.e., something far from chocolate & caramel), I HIGHLY recommend this particular SO - it is amazing!

Finally had a nice espresso from the La Semeuse Il Piacere beans I'm currently using. Turns out that grinding a smidgen finer did the trick and got rid of the ashy note I got from these beans. Still, the robusta (10%) used is not to my taste (and yes, there is good robusta!), providing a distinct earthiness to the taste, without the chocolate note I love. I think the rest of the beans will end up in cappa's. Had a really nice one last evening using these beans.