by GVDub on Sun Mar 22, 2009 1:54 pm
They say when you stop learning, you start dying. At the rate things are going, I'm likely to be around for a long time.
Well, this morning, I learned just how easy it is to disassemble the Caravel. I ground too fine, tamped too hard (with my improvised ibuprofen bottle tamper) and blew out the bottom seal. The ease of repair and maintenance is one of the things that drew me to this particular machine, and I have to say it paid off today. Drain the boiler (well, stick a series of cups under the head to catch the water pouring out past the unseated seal), remove it, pop out the piston and the screen (since the bottom seal is much more accessible from the screen end of the group head), rinse out the boiler and cylinder to make sure that there are no grounds that made their way to where they shouldn't be, rinse the seal and reseat it, then put the whole thing back together. Elapsed time, under 5 minutes. If I'd thought to put water on to boil as I started the job, I would have been pulling my next shot pretty much as soon as I'd finished with the repair. It was no big deal, which, I think, is exactly why Dr. Salati designed it the way he did.
I had the epiphany this morning (and epiphanies are so appropriately had on Sunday mornings) that my enthusiasm is getting the best of me and I need to take a step back. I'm trying to rush learning the grinder and the machine at the same time, making the classic newbie mistakes of altering too many variables at once, then having no idea which one made the difference - changing coffees, changing grinds, not paying as much attention to temperature stability, not developing consistency in my approach, either physically or mentally. I'm just so damn eager to learn that the eagerness is getting in the way of the lesson.
One of the things that makes it harder is not having a solid reference point. Most of what I've pulled from the Caravel so far is vastly better than any espresso I've gotten from *$, Coffee Bean, or pretty much any of the independent places I've been to here in the San Fernando Valley. As an example of the latter, while getting the car serviced in North Hollywood yesterday morning, I stopped into the Independent Coffee stand at Magnolia and Lankershim. They've got a two group Astra automatic and, when I asked about the espresso blend, made a big thing out of how the owner roasts his own beans. I asked for a single ristretto shot, and they packed up a double basket and gave me what came out of one spout, bitter from too much heat and over-extraction. At any rate, all this makes my destination a little fuzzy, as if I've planned a vacation to Texas, but don't know exactly where in Texas I'm heading - just Texas. In trying to decide if I'm headed for the hill country, Austin, or the bayous of southeast Texas, I signed up for the cupping class at Jones Roasters in Pasadena this coming Wednesday, just to start calibrating my palate a little more finely.
The third shot of the day (fourth, if you want to count the choked shot that blew the seal) was the winner, though. Tuesday night's roast of SM's Liquid Amber, ground just a little coarser than the choked shot with a tamp that barely kissed the basket enough to polish the top, came out with that melted butter mouth feel and those tobacco, smoke, and caramel notes Tom describes. That trip is, I think, coming into better focus.
"Experience is a comb nature gives us after we are bald."
Chinese Proverb
