Hi all,

First of all great forums, I've done a fair bit of reading and learnt some but also left with questions after reading some of the more advanced posts!

Please forgive me first of all I am a newbie. I've made the step from a basic bean-to-cup to the breville oracle.

I understand and accept I will likely need to do a fair amount of tweaking but hoping someone can give me a good starting point as I'm starting to get frustrated.

The best I've got so far is coffee starting to flow at 7 seconds (although it is dark black for the first few seconds) total shot time including pre infusion is 24 seconds. It is bitter and rancid.

Also when I remove he PF after use more water/coffee flows from it, which inevitably goes all over the kitchen floor.

The flow also seems a bit too watery but I've got it on 33 for grind setting...

Not sure if I should start fiddling with advanced settings on this machine or try to get it right using grind setting and flow time first?

Thanks in advance!

Hi,

I just picked up an Oracle as well. I am coming off a superauto so I am new to adjusting the parameters. I would steer clear of the advanced settings until you get a few shots that are good to you. For now, grind is going to be the thing that you should focus on and then from there you can tweak the rest of it.

Please note that i have about 10 minutes of experience here and there are many, many people on this board with years of experience. I am going to assume that they will correct me if I'm way out in left field.

I assume that you are using very fresh beans. If you don't have any find a local roaster or order from one of the board sponsors and get 2-3 lbs worth. Be prepared to burn through about 1 lb getting this sorted! I admit that my initial setup was with a bag of lavazza super crema which are mediocre (at best) beans but were left over from my superauto and they got the job done. I didn't mind burning through this to sort it out knowing that the end result was going to be mediocre (at best)

Next, find a way to measure out 2 oz / 30 ml and aim to get a grind that gets you 2 oz / 30 ml with a 30 second shot including a default pre-infusion. I found that if I ground too fine the coffee was bitter and I'd get about 1 oz +. Once I got a grind that got me to a 2oz shot in this time period it was not bad at all - a single step down in grind got me to where it is very good. I'm sure that someone with more experience would find a way to improve it but for week #1 this is a good start.

Hope this helps. Keep it simple at first and then move on to making other adjustments.

While the Oracle makes good espresso "easy", you are going to need barista skills to dial the machine in. Grocery store coffee won't cut it. You will need beans that you can verify the roast date on, and don't plan on using beans older than 2-3 weeks post roast. Forget the number on the grind indicator. It is a reference only. Adjust your upper burr to get you in the approximate middle of the number range and work from there. I would significantly shorten or turn off pre-infusion until you gain experience. It has a tendency to ruin good coffee if not used properly.

The Oracle has a tremendous amount of features and can make great coffee literally almost effortless, but it takes just as much knowledge and skill to get good coffee from as any traditional machine. If you are coming from a bean-to-cup, as mentioned you will likely burn through a lot of coffee learning how to use this. Have patience and take notes. The Oracle is capable of producing very good espresso. A bean-to-cup is not. Most bean-to-cup machines can somewhat consistently make mediocre drinks. The shots coming from the Oracle will be good or awful. There isn't much inbetween, just like a traditional grinder and machine setup. If the grind, temp, shot length, and bean freshness isn't spot on, you won't be happy with the result. Despite a little robot packing the portafilter for you, you are pulling a traditional shot and the skills needed to accomplish that are still needed. Perhaps that will be reduced if they add gravimetrics to the next version of the Oracle.

One thing to note is that the typical dose for the Oracle is 21 to 22 grams depending on coffee type. The basket used is an 18 gram basket very similar to the quality of VST. I used a ridgeless 15g VST basket on mine to get the dose down to around 19 gram dose. The machine sets the dose based on tamper fan load. The fan is at a fixed height and coffee is ground until packed to that preset height and the tamping force is registered using a load cell. The 15g basket has a shallower floor thereby lowering the dose. I would recommend keeping the machine in timed shot mode unless you are pulling several shots per day. In that case the internal volumetrics work pretty well, but the flowmeters are tempermental if only pulling one shot in the morning. The flowmeters are very consistent once you've pulled a couple shots. I found I didn't use mine consistently enough to bother with the volumetrics.

Basically: Don't get frustrated. It will take some time to learn the machine.