TrlstanC wrote:At least we're not into making our own mustard

Excellent.

CoffeeOwl wrote:we make many shots, we want to be consistent in what we do, and that needs skill.

I was using the term coffee loosely to make my writing less repetitive, but yes, we need a lot of skill. The skill of a barista and the gleam of a nice machine was probably what brought me to pursue espresso more thoroughly. It's like watching great chefs work: quickly, efficiently, well, with time-honed flair. The equipment portion is very important and fun (the machines are gorgeous), but the common denominator behind great shots is the barista.

Maybe we should write more threads about great espresso-consistency practice routines instead of machine based consistency. I bet I accidentally vary my dose by eyeballing more than my machine varies its temperature. We could compare how long it takes to dial in a shot perfectly and track our improvement.

I wonder if I should mention the hours I've lost analyzing the damage-per-second that different builds of my World of Warcraft characters could dish out in boss fights.

No. I won't post about that. I've never uploaded combat logs into online parsers to generate eyeball bleeding piles of statistics. No. Not me.

Postulate: if you've made it to home-barista, you have a slightly obsessive component to your personality. Heck, I like looking normal next to you guys.

Ken Fox wrote:Am I too sensitive?

ken

Nope.
Bernie

Ken Fox wrote:This evening, on my daily run through this board, I am struck by the shear "anality" of some of the posts and threads I've read. I don't want to embarrass anyone, which is why I'm not responding to any particular post and why I've chosen this "content not otherwise specified" forum for this post.

A LOT of the posts I've been reading aren't really about coffee, or something akin to "I had this great shot" and I'd like to reproduce it at home (or make it more often) but rather about this and that esoteric aspect of this or that esoteric thing that someone thought might in some way be related to something that might have something to do with coffee if we just thought about it enough.

Am I too sensitive?

ken

What, Ken? You have a La Marzocco GS/3, two Cimbali espresso machines, three Cimbali grinders and a Compaq K10, not to mention your home roasting setup, and you think people on this board are anal about their espresso hobby????

Ken Fox wrote:Being too Anal

And here I thought this was another thread about Kopi Luwak . . .

If you do anything that has several elements or steps, precision is required to get consistent results. So to an observant outsider, the process of making a shot efficiently or OCD-ishly will look very much the same.

I think the "differential diagnosis" between precision and OCD is whether each element makes a demonstrated functional contribution to the shot. OCDish people pick up procedural elements like dogs pick up fleas. For the espresso ones, every good shot ends up with another addition to the the song and dance that has to be done to make a "proper" shot.

It might be worth while spring cleaning ones espresso prep procedure each year. Cut out everything, and only add those things back which make shots more consistent.

I'm interested to know what others consider an "anal" step when making espresso at home. Having watched a number of espresso videos on Youtube, I'm often impressed by just how complicated some people manage to make transferring grinds from a grinder to a portafilter.

Bob_McBob wrote:I'm interested to know what others consider an "anal" step when making espresso at home. Having watched a number of espresso videos on Youtube, I'm often impressed by just how complicated some people manage to make transferring grinds from a grinder to a portafilter.

For the record, in my original post I was commenting on anality that was tangential to the process of either making coffee beverages or roasting coffee. I wasn't commenting on any particular fussy technique any individual might use to make a shot. We all have those to some extent and if they work for us then I wouldn't refer to that sort of thing as being anal.

ken

Hmm, this thread is starting to remind me of the cupper vs. barista thread on coffeed that was a real head-scratcher but led to some funny moments, including this great post by Geoff Watts.

I guess I'm saying I think I know what your saying but I'm not sure. (I'm dense that way)