Thanks Guys for all the ideas

The "variable" that I did not mention is that I live in the French Alpes and the kitchen in the morning is pretty cool, so its a fight to keep things warm.

This morning was successful because I took some of those ideas and combined them.

1. I preheated the Cups with hot water and let them rest until ready to use (the vibiemme does not do as good a job heating on the top shelf as other machines I've owned ie: Oscar and Racilio S1

2. Heat the milk max hot - less foam as foam tends to cool off very very quickly - but good "body" to the milk

3. Pour and deliver Quick

My only correction I need to work on now is the shot starts looking watery around the 20 second mark

I have to sneak around cause if my wife saw me practising on more coffee shots I will be sent off to the sanitarium for Coffeeaholics

Altitude is a killer. Some of your problems may be stemming from that, if you're fairly high in the Alps. If that's the case, there's a guy in the Rockies that may be able to help, Tal, at Espresso Smith.

Altitude is a killer. I use to live in Colorado. You had to compensate for altitude on everything, and I was only at 5K feet which is quite low in the rocky mountains.

I pull my cooling flush into my cup, prep my portafilter, do the final flush into the cup and then dump out the water and pull the shot into the cup. Steaming only takes 15 seconds so I do that while the shot is pulling.