Pull time is a diagnostic, not an absolute. What counts is time to the blonde point -- the time of balanced extraction. You want to slow that down so your the blond point hits within the target time range. Dose heavier, grind coarser.

At the end of they you may well prefer ristrettos to normales, vice versa, or it might vary with the bean. But brew ratio is just a style. You should be able to pull a balanced shot (not over or under extracted) at any ratio from ristretto to lungo.

Rich

The biggest mistake I made when starting out was trying to go by "blonding." Don't. Different coffees look different when you extract them. Lighter roasts won't show the same dark reddish color that darker roasts show.

Use a scale. Watch your brew time, brew ratio, and taste the shots. The blond point is subjective. Brew ratio and brew time aren't. And ultimately, it's the taste that matters.

Edit: And for brew ratio, I start with 20 grams of grinds and 35 grams of espresso in a VST 20 gram basket. I modify from there for the specific coffee.

Not sure I can condone this advice. It's just setting you up for failure in the future. Sure the coffees aren't all the same color, but a 'blonding point' is still apparent. I've pulled everything from city to FC+ beans and have always been able to find the blonding point. But hey, at least you're factoring in taste .

Most professional resources I've come across don't talk about blonding. They tend to focus on brew ratio, extraction time, and taste. Of course you assume that the technique is correct. If the barista wants to quantify the extraction, the coffee refractometer comes out. By focusing on blonding, I think this community does a disservice to newcomers.

You almost had me. I think it's backwards.

Newcomers almost never have the technique. Therefore, the blonding point is very useful to them (in addition to a bottomless portafilter).

Now, I also use a scale and a timer. However, I almost always stop at blonding and adjust the grind based on the time/mass. I sometimes stop prior and after blonding depending on the taste I want but this is not something i'd expect a newbie to do.

And finally, YMMV. You have your advice and I have mine. We both went through the hassles of being a newbie and both came out of it differently.

Well I may be a newbie but I'm kind of taking into account all advises in parallel: I'm looking for the blonde point, *and* weigh both the grounds and the drink, and I time it, and I pull it into a graduated shot glass, so I see myself as recording all potentially relevant variables.

boar_d_laze wrote:You should be able to pull a balanced shot (not over or under extracted) at any ratio from ristretto to lungo.

Exactly what I mean -- right now it seems that my ristrettos are much better balanced than my normales (haven't really tried lungos though) and I have trouble getting balanced (but still tasty) normales using the generally accepted parameters for dose, time, volume, weight, etc. It seems to met that using those accepted parameters I always end up with over-extracted shots.

One thing that I'm after is that extraordinary, explosive coffee flavor that I accidentally got in the few drops just before choking my machine. It seems to me that there should be a way to get this in a well-balanced double normale. That being said, I've never tasted this in cafés either -- when I taste balanced shots in cafés, the overall flavor is often much more subdued too.

So far though I've kept the dose relatively low (seldom past 16g) so this weekend I'll try higher doses (18g and perhaps more) with fresh beans (on my lunch break I was able to procure a pound of Social Coffee's People's Liberation and also a Colombian Piendamo from Bridgehead, both roasted 4 days ago).

Exordium01 wrote:Most professional resources I've come across don't talk about blonding. They tend to focus on brew ratio, extraction time, and taste. Of course you assume that the technique is correct. If the barista wants to quantify the extraction, the coffee refractometer comes out. By focusing on blonding, I think this community does a disservice to newcomers.

Maybe they should. I've had too many bad coffees in cafes where the barista took out a scale and a timer and stared at those instead of the obviously overextracted and watery espresso coming out.

I understand one can get obsessive about blonding, but I think it is a really good diagnostic. Some may like the results of letting the stream run after blonding, others immediately cut it off. But understanding the relationship between blonding points, dose, grind and most importantly, taste, is, at least in my opinion, and important skill on the road to great espresso. It is also cheaper than a refractometer

I don't think it is critical the find "the blonding point" (any objective one probably doesn't exist) but to consistently be able to judge a reasonable blonding point that can guide you to cut the extraction (whether you try to immediately cut it off or let it go a bit).

Of course, whatever works for any individual is what they should do.

Exordium01 wrote:Most professional resources I've come across don't talk about blonding. They tend to focus on brew ratio, extraction time, and taste. Of course you assume that the technique is correct. If the barista wants to quantify the extraction, the coffee refractometer comes out. By focusing on blonding, I think this community does a disservice to newcomers.

There are three different criteria for cutting the shot. Time, water volume (which translates imprecisely to shot weight) and the contemporaneous visual cues of blonde point and flow arc.

If technique is good enough for shot to shot flow rate to remain constant, then time and volume become the same as far as consistency in yield (same thing as level of extraction) is concerned. Sadly, most people don't have perfect technique...

It's typical to hear from home baristas who cut their shots by weight or time, and have trouble with under and/or over extraction. It's not only home baristas, though. Furthermore, many (most?) shops which pull "by the numbers" rather than by observation pull really bad shots.

Admittedly, judging extraction level by blonding and/or stream arc is fast, dirty and inexact, but such is life.

Rich

brianl wrote:You almost had me. I think it's backwards.

Newcomers almost never have the technique. Therefore, the blonding point is very useful to them (in addition to a bottomless portafilter).

Now, I also use a scale and a timer. However, I almost always stop at blonding and adjust the grind based on the time/mass. I sometimes stop prior and after blonding depending on the taste I want but this is not something i'd expect a newbie to do.

And finally, YMMV. You have your advice and I have mine. We both went through the hassles of being a newbie and both came out of it differently.

I think the bottomless portafilter offers better diagnostic cues than a subjective blonding point. If you're using a spouted portafilter, the story may change. I don't know though, I've always used bottomless portafilters though.

csepulv wrote: I don't think it is critical the find "the blonding point" (any objective one probably doesn't exist) but to consistently be able to judge a reasonable blonding point that can guide you to cut the extraction (whether you try to immediately cut it off or let it go a bit).

I agree much more with this point. In order to find "the blonding point," you need to pull and taste good shots to get a baseline of what a good shot looks like. You can't start by using a subjective scale you don't know the endpoints of, and that's the trap that starting out by judging blonding puts you in.

Exordium01 wrote:I think the bottomless portafilter offers better diagnostic cues than a subjective blonding point. If you're using a spouted portafilter, the story may change. I don't know though, I've always used bottomless portafilters though.

This is completely out of context, a confusing apples to orangutangs comparison. More, diagnostics and cues are two different things.

A bottomless portafilter offers information regarding distribution errors, it provides no extra information regarding extraction yield.

The blonde point isn't a diagnostic; it's a representation of extraction yield, cuing the operator when the pull is at the best extraction yield for the grind/dose and "cuing" him to cut the shot. Although the blonde point is slightly arbitrary -- it's an absolute. How subjective? Not much. Two people watching the blonding process may disagree on the exact moment of the blonde point, but once they have the idea of what it should look like, they won't vary by more than a couple of seconds.

Making espresso is a craft. There are a lot of judgment calls in doing it well.

If you want an example of a diagnostic related to extraction yield, take pull time to the blonde point.

Rich