Dogshot wrote:This makes sense, but is not what I have experienced. Sure, increase the dose when looking for a ristretto, but the grind needs to be coarser to get the crema and body of a ristretto. To see what I am talking about, try loosening the grind a little from the point posted in your video, and using the same dose. I would appreciate your take on the resulting shot. To me, it is more like a ristretto.

Mark

Shouldn't this yield a lungo? For me, keeping the dose same but grinding coarser* should make the coffee bigger by volume due the lesser resistance in the puck. You don't mention if he should tamp harder or softer, so I assume to keep the tamp the same level.



*I guess that's what you mean by "loosening the grind"?

Lusso Double Basket dimensions

Diameter of the perforated area at the bottom of the basket?

Arto wrote:Shouldn't this yield a lungo? For me, keeping the dose same but grinding coarser* should make the coffee bigger by volume due the lesser resistance in the puck. You don't mention if he should tamp harder or softer, so I assume to keep the tamp the same level.



*I guess that's what you mean by "loosening the grind"?

The water volume is fixed, so there are no volume changes. I keep the tamp the same, which is very light. If I grind fine enough but not so fine that there is no flow at all, the crema suffers dramatically. These are my worst shots.

Mark

Dogshot wrote:Sure, increase the dose when looking for a ristretto, but the grind needs to be coarser to get the crema and body of a ristretto. To see what I am talking about, try loosening the grind a little from the point posted in your video, and using the same dose. I would appreciate your take on the resulting shot. To me, it is more like a ristretto.

The grind in that shot in the Afternoon Doppio video was dialed in fairly well relative to the Lusso's water draw and pressure profile. When I coarsen the grind as you suggest, and do not increase the dose but keep it at 11g, the shot begins to blonde early into the second pull. Tamping with greater force to compensate for the greater coarseness of the grind might prevent this from happening or delay it, but I prefer to moderate the dose and grind and keep the tamp a constant in the equation.

Regards
Timo

P.S. What threw me off your meaning in your previous post was your choice of the word 'taper', which means 'to become gradually smaller'. I thought, mistakenly, you were referring to the basket itself becoming gradually smaller; rereading, I see you were simply commenting upon the diameter of the filter relative to the diameter of the basket.

Dogshot wrote:The water volume is fixed, so there are no volume changes. I keep the tamp the same, which is very light. If I grind fine enough but not so fine that there is no flow at all, the crema suffers dramatically. These are my worst shots.

Mark

Ok, now I understand (I guess)

I thought this way:

Because most of the blends tastes best at extraction-times around 30 s there should be a greater amount of coffee in the cup if ground coarser and pulled with the same pressure in same time.

A finer grind would yield in a smaller shot (ristretto) because the flow-restrictions produced by the finer grind and because the pressure is the same.



Because I don't own any spring-lever; I can't know. And therefore my derivations fail

This is a very interesting discussion. Who would have thought a year ago that anyone would even be interested in the finer aspects of 45-mm espresso. We've come a long way.

Andy's ratios of ground-coffee to beverage are by weight

Fortunately, he also provides volumes in the table, so when I don;t have a scale handy I substitute these. And I maintain that a 14g, 1-oz. shot is smack dab in the middle of the ristretto range, and it happens to be delicioso.

and a loose (for lack of a better term)

is long a better term?

My three-pull 1.5 oz shots would be long ristrettos or short normales.

Its all semantics, and long ago I proposed that any time someone wants to describe a shot they should give as complete a description as possible, i.e. dose, shot volume (or wt), and probably time.

BTW, my first AM, two-pull, 1-oz espresso (for lack of a more exact term) was delicioso.


PC

peacecup wrote:Who would have thought a year ago that anyone would even be interested in the finer aspects of 45-mm espresso.

Actually, ever since I hooked up with La Peppina, the differences in the cup of a 45mm spring lever versus a manual lever and versus a 58mm pump machine have been of interest to me; indeed, there have been a few rather spirited threads about this subject.

Since peacecup brings up the issue of semantics, I want to go back a few posts earlier in this thread to something Dogshot wrote, not because I have a bone to pick with him but simply to clarify a point.

Dogshot wrote:This greater tendency to under-extract is what I think allows the small volume baskets to produce richer tasting espresso than the brew ratios would imply.

The term underextraction might mislead some readers; it has negative connotations and is therefore not the most apt word to describe the extraction gradient when water under 6 bars of pressure passes through a tallish, narrowish cake of coffee as opposed to a shortish, broadish cake of coffee (i.e. 45mm tall basket versus 58mm broad basket). In the taller narrower cake, the coffee cake may undergo less extraction but the espresso produced is not underextracted in the pejorative sense.

Brew ratios are dependent upon a number of factors, including but not limited to depth and freshness of roast, type of bean and bean processing, dose, grind, tamp, temperature, preinfusion, and brew pressure -- and so it is best not to draw general conclusions from a limited range of very loosely controlled experiments. But I think one can say fairly safely that with 6 bars of pressure and taller baskets it is easier for the barista to avoid overextraction and the harshness that accompanies it.

Regards
Timo

timo888 wrote:The term underextraction might mislead some readers; it has negative connotations and is therefore not the most apt word to describe the extraction gradient when water under 6 bars of pressure passes through a tallish, narrowish cake of coffee as opposed to a shortish, broadish cake of coffee (i.e. 45mm tall basket versus 58mm broad basket). In the taller narrower cake, the coffee cake may undergo less extraction but the espresso produced is not underextracted in the pejorative sense.

Brew ratios are dependent upon a number of factors, including but not limited to depth and freshness of roast, type of bean and bean processing, dose, grind, tamp, temperature, preinfusion, and brew pressure -- and so it is best not to draw general conclusions from a limited range of very loosely controlled experiments. But I think one can say fairly safely that with 6 bars of pressure and taller baskets it is easier for the barista to avoid overextraction and the harshness that accompanies it.

Regards
Timo

Excellent clarifications! I use words like under-extraction, because I am borrowing from what Jim and Andy have been doing, and prefer to use the terminology that they are using, in order to minimize confusion. I agree that the term might imply to some that shots are deficient or unbalanced in some way, which is simply not the case.

re: brew ratios - I submit that the water volume of the shot is the single greatest determinant of this ratio. Therefore, I suspect that your variables selection may be more true for non-spring levers than spring lever machines. Given that 2 pulls will consistently give 30ml of water, there will be very little variance in brew ratios from a spring lever machine based on much other than dose. I know that using Andy's strict definition of brew ratio as the dry weight of the puck to the weight of the resulting shot, it is a huge challenge to produce anything with more than a 50% brew ratio on the PV. This falls on the low side of the brew ratios that I get from my Brewtus II, presumably because of the higher pressure and faster extraction rate of the pump machine and 58mm basket. I'm not sure what to make of brew ratios and the PV group, since my 50% Export shots are every bit as deep, rich, and full as the higher ratio shots I get from the DB, and certainly moreso than an equivalent ratio (45%-50%) shot from the DB.

I have tried several 13-14gm doubles on the Export over the past day. Squeezing 14gm into that basket is an art in itself, and I suspect that without doing some mid-tamping or serious PF tapping, I can't get much more than 13gm into the basket. What's interesting is that at 13+gm, there is no sign of brew-screen collision on the top of the spent puck, so the basket can certainly handle that amount. The shots have been...delicioso (thanks again PC). I mean seriously snacktacular shots (using both my home blend and Sweet Maria's Yemen San'ani). Regardless of whether the dose is 11gm or closer to 14gm, I now am convincing myself that the 45mm basket's tendency to extract slower (or less, ie. under-extract) can be offset by a faster pull to get a traditional-style shot. As Jim mentions in his paper on extraction, and is clear when brewing, a faster flowing shot will lead to a higher extraction rate. Based on this, and on the look and taste of the Peacecup-style shots, I think that for my taste and coffees, the best (richest, most balanced) shots are those where the pull does not slow to a creep (maybe 8-15 seconds, rather than 15-20 seconds). That is, the deeper column of coffee in the PV double basket benefits from a faster flow rate to get a 'traditional' extraction.

I'm learning that the PV is capable of producing a wide variety of shots, and that the range of shots rarely falls below the level that an espresso lover would consider 'very enjoyable'.

Mark

The lever has a finite per-pull water draw. One can bring more water to the extraction simply by giving an additional pull. If the additional pull results in more water than is necessary, simply remove the cup. Whether the machine be a manual-lever, spring-lever, or electrical pump, there are always two primary determinants to the brew-ratio: the dose and the water draw. Either of these factors can be increased or decreased within practical upper and lower limits.

I have found a nice two-pull routine. For me, those shots that conform to the classical 30 ± 5 seconds extraction time have been consistently delicious. With the coffees that I have been using (Rocket Dark Star and Caffe D'Arte Firenze), ground to the fineness I've been selecting, and tamped very lightly, this extraction time requires a dose of around 11g in the double basket.

That other types of pulls and modifications to the dosing are good also I do not doubt. But many variables go into a shot. There may be factors that account for the qualities you are liking that you are not taking into account: depth of roast, roast age, blend, coarseness of grind, etc. Enjoy the exploration.
Regards
Timo

P.S. What do you mean by "traditional"? My sense of what is traditional comes from using vintage levers, Peppina, Caravel, Cremina, and now the Lusso. Do you mean contemporary?

P.P.S. When you say 8-15 seconds, do you mean per-lever-pull or per extraction? If per-lever-pull, that would be a 16-30 second range for a two-pull extraction, a pretty wide range that encompasses the range I gave above for the shots most pleasing to me.