Breville Dual Boiler (BES920XL) Review - Page 2

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uscfroadie
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#11: Post by uscfroadie »

samuellaw178 wrote:It's cool to be able to pressure profile, but wouldn't it be sucking off the heat and affecting the temperature stability?
That's the beauty of the HX-fed brew boiler. You would need to flow a lot of water through the hot water tap to effect the temperature.
Merle

samuellaw178
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#12: Post by samuellaw178 replying to uscfroadie »

That is indeed very impressive! It's amazing how much feature they had packed into the machine at that price point.

estern
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#13: Post by estern »

old442 wrote:The 900 stops the shot when the water tap is opened. The key is to not open it far enough to trip the microswitch. Watch the video and you'll see the water tap LED never comes on.
Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't realize how little movement was needed. I was completely overshooting the cutoff before.

Works just fine on the 920 now that I'm doing it right. Haven't have a chance to play with it much, but I was able to drop by three bars and had decent control over the range in between on my first (re)attempt.

The hot water tap just slowly drips at worst, so I cannot imagine this technique making much of a difference in temperature.

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RapidCoffee (original poster)
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#14: Post by RapidCoffee (original poster) »

uscfroadie wrote:Great job on the review. I just wish you would have kept it longer to play with pressure profiling so you could re-evaluate your thoughts on it versus the big plumbed-in Vivaldi with line-pressure pre-infusion.
Hot water on the BDB comes from the brew boiler (not the steam boiler), so seat-of-the-pants pressure profiling (by opening the hot water tap) should work. This is a cool idea, wish I'd thought of it during the review.
uscfroadie wrote:A more fair espresso comparison would have been a Mini Vivaldi versus the Breville double boiler.
Please don't misunderstand: this was a review of the BDB, not an espresso machine shootout. Had this been a shootout, I would have included machines in the BDB price range (e.g., QM Silvano).

Since I have a Spaz Vivaldi and Gaggia Baby at hand, I thought it would be interesting to provide a comparison of these well-known espresso machines. The BDB performance was impressive, even when compared to a machine costing twice as much.

UPDATE: See the final review here.
John

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#15: Post by new2espresso »

I decided to test this on my bdb. The normal setting pressure a shot is just over 9 bar. Using the hot water knob, I was able to go from there all the way down too 4bar without the shot being cut off. Now I just have to get a coffee that works well with this hack. Any suggestions?
Kind regards,
Karan

estern
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#16: Post by estern »

I'm a newbie, but luckily there are some good sources of info for reference on pressure profiling.

Scott Rao says his most used custom pressure profile is basically an attempt to match lever style decline in pressure after a preinfusion, ramp up, and 8 bar flat peak (chapter 11 of Espresso Extraction).

My understanding is that lighter roasted, higher acid beans do well with a slightly lower (and declining) pressure. Jim Schulman's Bezzera Strega video clued me in to this, as well as a bunch of comments on lever machines here at HB.

I tried two doubles of SO dry processed Ethiopia side by side this morning, one using the default 2 cup program and one in manual mode with a roughly equivalent preinfusion, peak at 8 bar, and attempting to decline from there. Same dose and grind setting.

I definitely need more practice to nail the ensuing pressure from the amount of handle turn. That said, the two shots were clearly, very different. Less acidic on the declining pressure, but seemingly a bit more fruit out of the first. Maybe because of the acidity, even. I'll keep playing. It's nice to have the option.

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erics
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#17: Post by erics »

Hey John -

A very well written and great review . . . especially on the pro's and con's.
Skål,

Eric S.
http://users.rcn.com/erics/
E-mail: erics at rcn dot com

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