One way of reassuring yourself is to invite me over every few years
I haven't visited Ken Fox for about a year and a half. When I tasted the first few shots, I was amazed at how much the espresso had improved. His shots had been good a few years back, but now they were top class, as good as I was getting anywhere.
Ken has made quite a few changes since then. Like everyone else, he's taking advantage of the better greens now available. He's changed his roasting profiles to bring out the best from them. He's changed over to higher end grinders. He's tweaked the temperature management on his PIDed machines. And he's changed dose.
We didn't do any formal testing, but we did a few sets of blind shots. The biggest two differences is going to better coffee and better roasting profiles. This resulted in shot differences that were large enough to be clear on every single shot to both of us. Trust me, everyone who's ever done blind testing knows this means the difference is very large.
The difference made by better temperature management, changing dose, and grinders are more subtle. The shots clearly taste different. To Ken, who is accustomed to the coffees, his current dose, grinders, etc seem right, while to me they mostly seemed different but not better.
To some extent, it's an accumulation of small improvements. But if I had to give weights to everything, I'd say the coffee and the roast are the big things, while the mano, maccina, and machina changes are, to a large extent, about best accomodating the improved coffees.
And talking about improved coffees ... Here's a video of us taking on a three year old frozen decaf that Ken dug out of his freezer ...
[gvideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=338749232582330376[/gvideo]
