And I just spent the last 3 hours playing with her and burning through rather a lot of milk and about 3/4 of a pound of beans.
I have to say that I'm really impressed with Chris' packing. Plus Anita was very easy to remove from the outer and inner box. Having some water test strips included to verify what I'd already determined by taste and smell was useful and thoughtful.
Setting Anita up next to Rocky on the kitchen counter was a revelation. Rocky used to dwarf my Saeco, now it's the other way around. Heck, Anita makes the microwave look small. If I'd got a bigger machine I'd have been banished to the bike room with it.
Handling Anita's portafilters, baskets, parts - it's clear that the Saeco was just a toy and this is the real deal.
I'm so glad I printed out all of Dan's suggested reading and read it prior to her arrival and brought the whole binder-clipped bundle down to the machine. It is simply amazing how sensitive Anita is to tiny variables in grind and dosage.
I totally get it now why Rocky's stepped grind adjustment is inferior to some of the nicer grinders. I still don't quite have the grind thing exact. Seems like one click is too slow of a pull and another is too fast. I used the timer as a guide but mostly watched the pull and tasted it.
I am glad though, I have a small scale and I've been using it to dose. Oddly enough, the 18 grams that worked in the Saeco seems to be a nice consistent double with Anita. I tried varying dosage by 1/2 to a full gram when trying to dial in grind and it seemed that the magic weight is 18.
The bottomless portafilter is just the best. I am so glad I got that thing, even if I'm just doing doubles in it right now. One thing that the non pressurized portafilter I got for the Saeco and the 2 months I spent playing with it did was teach me some good dosing skills. This was evident when watching my shots extract. I can tamp nicely.
Again, I really appreciated the information on doing a cooling flush on my machine. I'd still like to have some sort of temp verification in the group head - but I'll trust what Dan says. I wish the instructions from Chris had included information about the flush though, that's the only thing they were really lacking in my opinion.
Water is not the easiest thing to manage. Someone, somewhere had suggested furniture slides for the little rubber feet to facilitate turning a machine around to add water on one's counter. I got the slides before I saw Anita and I'm glad I did. I do have to steady her when putting the portafilter in and ultimately I think I need a cork or ping pong ball and a funnel instead of turning here 90 degrees for filling. And fill I did, but then again I went through 3/4 lb of coffee today.
Yes, I did the portafilter wiggle between shots and also backflushed the machine with water when my session was done. Thank you all who made cleaning suggestions.
Lastly, microfoam is mine! I got perfect microfoam first time out. Then I struggled with slightly stiffer stuff a couple of more times, then tried to recreate my first try by adding a little whole milk to the 2% and increasing my volume of milk slightly. It gets up to temp so fast, so much faster than the Saeco. I'll need to change the order I do things, coffee first, than milk. At least Anita has steam and pressure to spare.
Anyway, today was a lot of data to absorb. Anita is on a timer to wake up at 6:00 am tomorrow, I'll see how I do when I get up at 6:30.
Thanks all of you for your help.
Ann
.
