The one problem you will run into is that it will be impossible to replicate what you get in the shop due to differences in equipment, water, technique, etc... But you should be able to get something that resembles what they pull in the café. Differences in the grinder alone will make a big difference in the cup but as I said, you should be able to reproduce something similar.

Hi Dave

I did indeed get something that resembles what I tasted in the cafe, but that's as far as it goes. Their description of what you should get from the coffee goes like this:

Espresso: syrupy with very dark chocolate and teak oil (wtf I thought teak oil would be poisonous)
Flat White: cocoa and malt
Cafetiere: dark fruit and dark chocolate.

What I got when I tasted it in the cafe was fruitiness and malt with a really nice flavour in between.

What was weird when trying this at home was I got different flavours with different shots. Mostly fruitiness of one hue or another or malty/chocolatey/smoky but not more than one flavour at a time. And the intensity of flavour at home was very muted in comparison to the shot at the cafe.

On the plus side, knowing what I was aiming for allowed me to improve the shots as time has gone by.

So definitely worth doing.

Having a baseline is good. You have to know where the target is before you can aim at it. Now you can make small changes to fine tune your shots and find that happy medium. To replicate what they produce you would have to get the same espresso machine, grinder, filter system, water, etc... but you should be able to get something close and acceptable with home equipment.