Here's the scenario. It was my last night at home, before going out on a trip. I had none of my home roast left, and I didn't want to roast more, just to use it before it was properly outgassed, and then come home in two weeks to find it already aging. All I had was some foil packs of preground Starbucks, from some hotel room somewhere. But I was jonesing for some espresso, and still in the excited, honeymoon phase with my new espresso machine, (Breville Dual Boiler), so I did the unthinkable...

Here are the things that were shockingly wrong:

- I tore open and mixed, a regular and a decaf, preground Starbucks coffee pillow, from the foil packages.

- reground already drip-ground beans... to a setting even finer than I normally use for espresso, because I knew they were ages old. The fineness required was complete conjecture.

- pulled the shot, and even though finer than my dialed in grind for fresh beans, the pour was too fast.

- if you are a gauge-watcher, it barely if at all, reached 7 bar.

-thin, almost nonexistent crema

I was on my way to sink-it without even tasting it

but...

- got involved talking something over with my wife before I had a chance to dump that turd I just extracted, and (horrors),

- mindlessly took a sip

I froze mid-sentence. It was AMAZING. Not just good for inexcusably bad coffee, but seriously good. Really really good. So good I didn't want it to end. Easily the best shot I had made since I got the new machine. In fact, it was as good as I can remember in my ten years since I got my first pump-espresso machine. It was salty caramel up front, with a medium-bright finish that you wanted to last forever.

Earlier in the day, I had set the brew temp upward, 1 degF hotter than the default setting of 200 degF. And I stopped it a wee bit ristretto: 29g of extracted beverage from an 18.0g dose, where I usually extract normale's: 18g grinds/36g extraction. Surely such small things alone could not have turned the toad into the princess? Would it?

Is it possible that some improbable sequence of things that are classically bad, acted in a symbiotic way just this one time, to make a great tasting shot? Obviously it's possible, because it happened. Have I just blundered into one of the great things about espresso... That it still has an unknowable'ness to it? That no matter how we try to quantify, and control, and eliminate variables, we still have a lot to learn?

I tried another one the next morning the same way, and it was just, "meh". Not quite a sink shot, but no magic at all.

-Peter

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maybe you were just craving coffee so badly almost anything would have tasted good in that moment?