michaelbenis wrote:I love these discussions! Twenty posts of frank exchange and we find we all basically agree!

Ummm... actually no, we don't all agree.

coffeefrog wrote: Psyd's comment about 203/30 is an example. I think he is wrong about it as a starting point, he thinks he is right, we will probably not agree on it.

There is no authoritative primer on the state of the art and I don't believe that the newbies you refer to really want one. They want easily digested, single dimensional answers to their questions and they will grab them when they see them.

I dunno if it's the best starting point, but it is the simplest way to get someone (who has a new machine and grinder, and has accepted that fresh beans are important), from putting away cardboard and packing peanuts to pulling a decent shot. Regardless of what kit you have, or how much experience you have, a "level portafilter, tamped to approx, thirty pounds, with a grind that allows the machine to produce two ounces of espresso in twenty-five to thirty seconds with water that is 196- 205 degrees Fahrenheit, at 9 Bar" will produce something that will make a Green Apron blush in shame.
It's the 'basics'. While you and I both know people that will argue that 198.3 is a better temp, and still others that will refute that with their 201 degrees, and both will suggest different pressures, 9.2 Bar, or 8.5, no tamp, round-bottomed tamp, no-touch, plasti-crap tamp, or some other witchery, chucking all of this at a fresh-out-of-the-box noob is probably only going to get them to box it back up and ship it back to their supplier.
It's a primer, if you will. A basic, one technique fits all starting point that once reached, can initiate some experimentation.
But that's just me.

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - Einstein

The depth and width of the debate here at home-barista does not really surprise me anymore, excellent.

To stay on the lighter side, of the Andersen tale
(Is Dan actually saying we are all princesses?)
What about the interpretation of Andersen's true story?
The classical interpretation is the girl that slept on the 20 mattress plus 20 eiders bed was nitpickingly picky. But was that what Andersen wanted to tell?

(The pea experiment, btw, was not double blind, against HB standards.)
The soaking girl claimed to be a princess, which could have been true, or she just was suffering from Muenchhausen or some other psychosis.
The royal family believed her (what does that make them?)
Now maybe the royal family was really stupid with this experiment.
The girl arrived soaking wet, water running out of her shoes, probably caught a cold, and next they let her sleep ON 20 eiders.
Have you ever tried to sleep on a bed that was warm and too soft underneath in a cold room with nothing on top? After you probably got soaking wet in the cold European castle in the cold rain and caught a cold consequently? If you did sleep on such a bed after not catching a cold, you must have been drinking too much of other beverages than coffee, or else you would never sleep on such a bed. I guess you would have felt black and blue when you woke up, even if you had not been boozing. Yet the queen mother believed the girl had felt the pea under all those layers. Silly attribution.
And then this ill mannered ungrateful girl impolitely thinking aloud tells she did not sleep well on the royal bed. Now she must be a princess? Still, she did not hypothesize out loud that some foreign object had been underneath all those layers. Or so the true story goes. Because else she might have qualified as member of these HB fora and she would have been our queen and role model. One thing is sure in this true story, the royal family took the girl's impolite assertiveness for proof of nobility (would the plot of the story originate from before the French revolution?)

It appears Andersen is teaching us about Muenchhausen or concepts we now know from (social) psychology like attribution and "group think". When these still had to be formally documented by the respective academic disciplines.

We may have to think more of the royal family in this story than the girl claiming to be a princess. And then conclude we think less of them.

Regards
Peter

another_jim wrote:So my preference in fairy tale reviewers is the kid in the "Emperor's New Clothes."

+1. This is a much better metaphor for outrageous claims on the coffee fora.

another_jim wrote:My favorite pair in this category are two alt.coffee cleaning tips, the PF wriggle and the no detergent back flush. Every time I've done a thorough cleaning after doing these time honored rituals, and after doing nothing, I've gotten the same amount of crud; so I suspect they would not stand up in a proper experiment.

Interesting choices. I bless the unknown inventor of the PF wiggle every time I make espresso, and observe all the coffee grinds flushed out of the grouphead. OTOH I've taken it for granted that water backflushes do something useful... Maybe they don't.

To be precise, I don't think the PF wriggle or plain water back flush do any more cleaning than a regular flush of the same amount. I do think both techniques get rid of crud when compared to doing nothing at all.