SinkShot wrote:Hi, I am very new to this forum. I have digested just about all the barista tips as I could on this and other sites, but I still could not find a discussion on the trade-offs of dosing quantity versus grind.
The general ("golden") rule is to obtain about 45ml (1.5oz) for espresso in approximately 25 seconds using a tamp pressure of 30 pounds. And, this seems to be for either a single shot or a short double (ristretto). I am interested in the trade-offs between the quantity of coffee used versus the fineness of the grind, when pulling a short double. Technically, 14g of coffee should be used for a double, but almost everyone here seems to be using 16-20+ grams of coffee, and even using triple baskets. I know many say they only volume dose and don't care, but there are quite a few people who actually weigh their beans to get this larger amount of coffee.
In any case, one can achieve the 45ml shot in 25 seconds using 14g of coffee at grind "x", or achieve the same 45ml volume of coffee using something like 17g of coffee at grind "y". And, of course there is probably a profile of bean weight/volume versus grind for a given coffee (of course at various temperatures and pressures as well, but for this discussion, we assume these are already fixed).
So, I don't exactly understand why more bean weight/volume is being used by so many people. Does more coffee really improve the quality of the shot? And if so, how much is enough? (e.g., a quadruple basket?) Why don't people seem to fix the weight of doubles to the "standard" 14g?
Thanks.
The thing is that you are getting off into an area of "personal preference" that is not the same thing as simple barista skills. In order to develop simple competent barista skills you need to keep everything more or less constant and only manipulate 1 variable. What this would mean is that you would have a machine with say, standard single and double baskets for your machine. You would learn how to dose each of these baskets to produce an appropriate volume for each basket for the drink you want to make. For example, you would try to produce about 1.5 oz from the single and 3.0 oz. for the double, to make standard "North American Length" singles and doubles. These should take about 25, maybe 30 seconds to produce. If you are trying to make ristrettos, you would be trying to make about 0.75 oz. from the single and 1.5 oz. from the double. The ristrettos would take longer to make, maybe 35 or perhaps even 40 seconds. Since the shots take longer to produce and are of smaller volumes, the grind must be finer in order to accomplish this. Dosing in the baskets should be approximately the same. In order to keep things simple you would perhaps want to use a straight edge to sweep off the top of the PF, ensuring a constant volume.
Once you become competent at producing these sorts of shots, and what you have to do to accomplish this becomes reflexive, then you can tinker around the edges and play with how much coffee you put in the basket and other basket sizes (such as triples). The drink volumes I've given are approximate and many here (myself included) make smaller drinks than even the ristretto volumes given above, and as you note we often do it with more coffee in the basket, which is to say that we "updose." If you updose then the grind will by necessity have to be a little coarser to produce the same volume over a set period of time.
But we didn't just start out making 1.25 oz. doubles from 18g of coffee after a week spent with our espresso machines and grinders. Whatever it is that we do, if we have been doing it for a while, evolved over a period of time when we tried out a whole bunch of ways of doing this and then we settled on what worked best, for us. In all cases this would have been a personal choice based on personal experience and taste.
You can't do any of this stuff competently until you can reliably make the standard drinks while alternating only the grind to deal with such things as changes in humidity, age of the coffee, type of the coffee, etc., the things that crop up every day and several times a day on some days, that make consistent espresso making a challenge to even those who are experienced in trying to make it.
No one here can tell you what sort of tinkering around the edges of shotmaking is going to make the sort of shot that you prefer. Once you get the basic skills down pat, which will take practice, practice, practice, then you can discover for yourself by trial and error how you like your espresso made. Using more coffee does make a "richer" shot, but then maybe it is "too" rich for your taste. I played around with triple baskets for a couple of weeks when I finally had a bottomless PF that could take a triple, but after two weeks of experimentation I decided that triple baskets made coffee too rich for my own taste; I no longer use them. But for you they might be exactly what you are seeking. And to be honest, I might change my mind on triples next week, I just don't know.
ken
. Sadly, I must agree with you; my idiosyncrasies can fill up a volume as thick as the crema on those shots. But for the record, at home I do both, hand tamp and auto tamp and it depends mostly on my mood or level of consciousness at 6:00 a.m. As to dosing by volume, I never liked it because I'm too darn anal, and the 1/2 gram increments I often use to find the coffee sweet spot are easier to achieve with a gram scale. Chris Tacy will passionately disagree with me on this, but luckily, he's nowhere to be found.
