Try this test :

Find a shop that pulls a great shot.
Visit that shop over the course of a week on different barista shifts.
One can receive Kirsch Chocolat in the morning and BBQ Kaffe on the afternoon shift from the same roast, grinder and machine.

Oh, yeah. NEVER buy just one pound of a new coffee.

JimWright wrote:So, this morning I was emailing with Mike McKim of Cuvee Coffee Roasting and I asked him about recommended dose/temp for his Medici Blend. He responded immediately with a suggested temp, brew time and volume, and this got me to thinking.

So what was Mike's advice regarding this specific blend? I picked up a couple of pounds of this last night at Caffe Medici in Austin, and am keen to know .

it is difficult to prescribe brewing parameters for a given coffee that will be applicable to everyone. what works well for us on our GB/5 likely will not see the same results on an e61 home machine or a la pavoni. personal preference may also play a large factor. personally i like our classico brewed as a normale ground fine with 15-16 grams for about 25 sec at 203 degrees. this is actually quite difficult to do on the standard LM baskets. what most of our accounts serving this coffee do is the opposite heavy updose 21-23 grams and a coarser grind and longer extraction time 27-28 sec. this yields a very smoky fruity heavy espresso where as the lighter dose is soft balanced nutty and floral. one is not necessarily better than the other and your equipment set-up, water, and personal tastes will all play into how the coffee should be extracted. espresso all has to work as a system. each piece of the puzzle will determine what will be optimum extraction wise, and of course this may change day to day as the coffee ages.

I think Luca and Miguel are exactly right. Specific instructions are actually worse than worthless, they can be downright harmful! Clearly the participants here may/will/should (if they stop to think about it) that what is "right" for an e61 HX machine may not be the same with a saturated group or for a lever model . . . let alone for different e61 machines, or different dual boiler models . . . let alone for personal preferences!

It's much like winemakers including suggested food recommendations on the back labels of their wines, or suggested drinking windows . . . taste is personal, and while one person may like their Cabernet Sauvignon to be 15 years old, another may prefer it at age 4 -- and it varies with each vintage. Wine is an agricultural crop, same as coffee, and no one size fits all.

The closest you could possibly get is something along the lines of what Dan wrote above:

HB wrote:Something along the lines of "cool / medium / medium-hot / hot" for brew temperature and "downdose/ regular dose / updose" are about as good as it gets.

And there will be exceptions to even that!

Cheers,
Jason

sgstarks wrote:So what was Mike's advice regarding this specific blend? I picked up a couple of pounds of this last night at Caffe Medici in Austin, and am keen to know .

As a starting point he suggested 201 degrees, 8.5 to just under 9 bars pump pressure, aiming for a 3/4 - 1 ounce shot volume in 28 seconds - I assume this was for a single normale, but haven't heard back yet to confirm or on dose.

In any case, notwithstanding differences between machines, different people having different tastes, etc., I, for one, am happy to have a place to start from someone who has invested some time experimenting with the blend!

Oh and Ian, spot on, and Bryan, thanks for posting, I'll be sure to try the Bella Vita and the Bundja.

Jim,

sorry for the late reply, but I don't get time to cruise these forums often.

In the store Medici uses LM triple baskets, and the baristas tend to dose 26 or so grams. This is a light roasted espresso blend so you can get a large amount of coffee by weight into the pf.

We all dose volumetrically though, so I would use the dose that works best with your machine. In a LM use enough coffee so that when you lock the puck in you see the indentation of the screw but not the screen (w/o extracting).

hope you enjoyed your coffee!

Dan:

I stopped by Cafe Medici this weekend and bought a bag of the Medici blend and a sampled a straight shot. It was busy, and truthfully, the prepared shot tasted bad (sour). I still took the bag home, and dialed in the grind on my home machine, and man is it good.

What other blends of your coffee for espresso (freshly roasted) are available in town?

Mark

Mark,

glad you had better luck with your coffee at home. The Medici crew has many new faces right now and they are all working hard to become solid baristas, many of them with no previous experience, so hopefully your next trip there will be better.

You can get our Meritage espresso at a couple of other retailers in Austin. Esotico is off Barton Creek Rd, and Bar None in Georgetown. Dhaba Joy carries our Organic Espresso Gran Cru.

Those are our only other two espresso blends, we try to stay focused on a few coffees and do them really well, and hope that you see the results. Although if you were really persistent you could probably talk Clancy into sending you some of his USBC blend that he devised.