David, tell us what you REALLY think!

Good old Schomer; right or wrong, he's always absolutely and instantly sure.

I crossed paths with him once, and without going over the details of our short conversation, I perceived his attitude towards me as condescending. Here he speaks from the mount, calling what Illy does Bull*&$% yet he writes in regards to pressure profiling after, "...just a few hours here and there," of playing with profiled machines that a flat pressure profile is best based on, "...purely an espresso geeks intuition...but I bet I am right."

This is the same guy who claimed (iirc) to be the first to PID an espresso machine, claiming it months after some "other guys" had produced the evidence of its benefit on alt.coffee. Andy... You remember who those guys were?

In regards to Mr. Schomer, and to paraphrase what Adam said to Eve:
"STAND BACK! I don't know big this guy's ego's going to get!"

Along these lines, I can make a statement that I think is defensible. No matter how Mr. Schomer's coffee blends are extracted, regardless of temperature and/or pressure, it is unlikely that I will like them.

ken

Randy G. wrote:I crossed paths with him once, and without going over the details of our short conversation, I perceived his attitude towards me as condescending. Here he speaks from the mount, calling what Illy does Bull*&$% yet he writes in regards to pressure profiling after, "...just a few hours here and there," of playing with profiled machines that a flat pressure profile is best based on, "...purely an espresso geeks intuition...but I bet I am right."

Well said. I read a bunch of amens to Schomer's post on various coffee professionals' Twitter feeds last night and was flabbergasted. Sure, pressure profiling may be a bust, but Schomer has little place to say it and most certainly no place to make some of those other assertions in his post. To me this is the opposite of what coffee professionalism should be about. Swift judgments, gut feelings, false assertions (that flat temperature profile is necessary to preserve fragrant molecules? Seriously?). I'm all for seeing people push back on pressure profiling and being skeptical and what not. But, there's a fine line between skepticism and superstition.

What continually astonishes me about his pronouncements is his apparent assumption that a cake of coffee grounds is a unity, in the sense that he seems to think that the whole cake is impacted simultaneously by the brew water temperature/pressure. "Stable" brew temperature isn't stable within the puck, and neither is pressure (at least initially).

While I agree that there is, perhaps, more hoopla about pressure profiling than is warranted, of the Emperor's New Clothes sort, I think a "few hours here and there" is insufficient time for real evaluation. He certainly hasn't done any sort of systematic evaluation. Neither have I, and I would love to.

My take on pressure profiling is that adjusting grind, weight and temperature pretty much test the limit for what even the most dedicated baristas can or are willing to deal with in a busy coffee bar environment. The improvement made by pressure profiling would have to be pretty amazing for them to add it to their responsibilities, and so far that does not seem to have happened. Witness Greg Scace's idle controller at Intelligentsia Venice and all the Synesso paddles used as on-off switches.

Automating pressure profiling, as the new LM Strada does, could change all that, and I'll be interested to see what happens.

My take on pressure profiling is that adjusting grind, weight and temperature pretty much test the limit for what even the most dedicated baristas can or are willing to deal with in a busy coffee bar environment. The improvement made by pressure profiling would have to be pretty amazing for them to add it to their responsibilities

I agree. Manual pressure profiling seems to me to be chucking in another variable when an extra one isn't really needed. That said, however, I think automatic pressure profiling, in a larger and more general sense, may have some benefits worth pursuing. The same holds for temperature profiling. Again, it's going to take a systematic evaluation... not just pulling shots while wiggling the handle and saying, "See, isn't that better? It must be because I 'profiled' the pressure!" Better than what?

Spring-powered espresso machines have had "pressure profiling" for decades. From what I've read of the newfangled programmable variety, one of the best profiles emulates that already provided by a spring (i.e., slowly declining). The more things change, the more they remain the same, eh?

Back to the OP, I do appreciate Schomer's summary judgment of Illy's packaging:

David Schomer wrote:Kind of like Illy's bullsh$t about pressurized cans so they can sell stale coffee world-wide for exorbitant amounts of money....espresso is complicated enough. Give us a break.

one of the best profiles emulates that already provided by a spring (i.e., slowly declining)

The same probably holds for temperature, too. Folks often forget that brewing coffee is really two functions, extraction and dilution. The tail end of a shot is mostly dilution, and we really don't want heavy extraction at that point.