I highly recommend dialing in your grinder so that you get the best coffee you can out of the Lavazza coffee. I believe the coffee that we sent with the machine is the coffee Lavazza uses for the Cafe's under the model name "Super Crema". After you dial in the grinder you will be able to get a very thick and rich crema from it and you will be able to get the shot timing you desire. There is no reason for the coffee to run to fast, just set your grinder finer. I have no doubt that you will be very surprised by the taste. We get our coffee direct from Lavazza in Italy and it is packaged, put in a container and on the boat right after it is roasted. It will taste very much like the Lavazza you get in the Cafe in Italy. Second this will give you a great opportunity to mess around with your Brewtus and grinder, so that when you do go out and get your coffee from your specialty roaster you won't waste it while trying to learn your new machine.

How about letting us know how you make out after giving it a good try?

Todd Salzman
Whole Latte Love

08M3SedanSki wrote:... but that Lavazza tasted so good when we were in Italy .

Yeah,you are wright.I asked about and was told, that it is not the same Lavazza coffee, which goes to bars, with the one, going to our homes.

Kevin

Your Compak grinder should be just great for fine tuning any grind you might need. However, I did find it MUCH easier to do and to change and repeat settings after I put the fine adjustment shown in the photo below. It's a shame Compak did not put an adjustment measurement worthy of the grinder with the product.


Good luck

Thanks for all the latest comments. I am skiing in Colorado this week but before I left, I was getting some great tasting shots with lots of crema from my "old, stale" Lavazza beans. I am sure that freshly roasted would give the best flavor but this tastes very good to me. Theodore, I have also been to Athens and had wonderful coffee there. GC7, thanks for the idea of how to better indicate grind settings on the K-3 Touch... very nicely done. The good news is that there is lots of fresh snow here! The bad news is that I am drinking drip coffee.

Kevin

08M3SedanSki wrote:The bad news is that I am drinking drip coffee.

Could be worse. You could be drinking bad espresso...

08M3sedannski, I will be receiving my Brewtus III on January 5th.
Now I am considering to purchase the same grinder. I wonder if polished aluminum and polished stainless steel match well.....

Thanks

I think that the picture exaggerates the color difference between the stainless and the chrome. They are definitely different but it doesn't scream out at you in person. If they would have had a true fire engine red color I would have gone with that but I didn't care for the other color options. My other thought was that if I wanted to upgrade the grinder down the road, the chrome version would probably be easiest to sell second-hand.

What I will tell you is that when I hear my wife talking to her friends about my new espresso machine and grinder the main point she makes is that she likes the grinder best because it is so quiet and easily grinds exactly the right amount on demand.

Kevin

My machine is now fully plumbed. For water supply I tapped off of the 1/4" supply to my fridge. The water goes through an RO unit in the cabinet under the machine. I used an auto shut-off supply line that will close if a too high of flow happens. The RO outbound pressure looks to be about 8PSI on a full RO tank which is working fine. I also ran a 3/4" poly tubing drain line into a stand pipe in the house drain system.

For convenience I installed a heavy duty digital timer to control the machine start time... ready to go when I get up. I also put a 2.5 gallon small wet/dry vac under the machine in the cabinet for quick clean-up.

My grind is now dialed in (grinder is amazing... quiet, fast, and fresh grind all the time) and I am getting good froth on my milk and good crema on my shots! Taste is great.

Regards,

Kevin in Atlanta

08M3SedanSki wrote:I used an auto shut-off supply line that will close if a too high of flow happens.

I just reset one of these auto shut-off valves. The toilet in the main bathroom stopped filling and yet the sink right beside it was just fine. I finally remember I had put in one of these auto-valves..... Don't take off the tape with the reset instructions or someday you'll be puzzling out where is the water...

Got any pictures of the drain line + stand pipe? It's still on my to-do list.

Mark

No pictures of drain but I can describe. I drilled a 1 1/4" hole in the plastic recessed panel behind the fridge that the water supply valve sits in to supply water to the fridge. I drilled a hole below this panel from the basement in the unfinished bathroom (only room left unfinished happened to be in the right place!) I snaked the 3/4" tube drain line down through the holes and across unfinished bathroom in floor joists and used a barbed fitting to connect to the stand pipe in the unfinished bathroom. Of course if the bath were already finished, I would still be using a bucket for a drain...