After days of experimenting with three different blends of just three days old I still only manage to get baskets of fruit in my shots but no nuts. Zero. It's getting kind of frustrating cause the same blends actually taste mostly of nuts and hardly any fruit at the roaster. I have tried boiler pressures of 0.9 to 1.3 bar, underdosing and overdosing, long and short cooling flushes, long and short rebound times, hard tamping and no tamping, playing with the grind. All the time only changing one factor. The numbers are also good as in 25-30 sec for 50ml on 15 gr. The result in the cup looks pretty good as well. Loads of reddish brown crema, nice and even extraction with tiger striping (naked PF), mottling in the cup, you name it. Nonetheless, no nuts, no chocolate, just fruit and tea like aroma's in the nose. When slurping it in it is quite sour. This has lead me to thinking the temp was too low. But, at 1.3 bar I cannot imagine that the temp is too low. Especially not because the blends are all quite dark roasted. I also leave the machine on for an hour before I start using it. Furthermore, stopping the cooling flush immediately after the water dance stops and then taking it easy while grinding and tamping still doesn't help at all. I've tried measuring the water temp in a pre heated rubber thingy and managed to get a 91 C reading on a very slow kitchen thermometer. I expect the brew temp at the puck to be at least 3 C higher. I am really puzzled here. I have ordered Eric's device to get some insight into the grouphead temp but until it arrives I would still like to drink some nutty stuff.
There might be one more thing worth mentioning. When the water dance stops during the cooling flush, the water flow is interrupted completely for one to two seconds. After that the water starts flowing again at a constant rate. I don't know if this is normal.
Any tips are more than welcome!
Cheers,
Elbasso
P.S. I have descaled the whole machine twice and also pulled the mushroom, and basically cleaned all the individual parts. Same goes for the dispersion screw and screen. Everything looks shiny and new.
. Somewhere in the 200 - 201 range. But my consecutive "short" flushes were actually too long and came too early. This leads to a grouphead that keeps cooling off further and further. Hence the fruit / sourness. What's even better is that with Eric's device I am able to have a much more stable intra shot temperature which leads to a better extraction. Even the worries about scale building up in the HX path is taken away because I am able to exactly repeat Eric's thermal graphs taken from his Anita. I can highly recommend his device to anyone owning an E61 with an exposed grouphead.
