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.