Hello everyone,

I'm quite new here and to making my own espresso in general but I'm learning as fast as I can haha. I will introduce myself accordingly as soon as I can.

I recently got a quite pretty Francis Francis x1 brass boiler. I also got myself a real tamper instead of the plastic two-piece thing included.

Currently I use the real tamper to tamp my grounds (small pack ground in a coffee shop because I don't have a good grinder yet and I wanted to take that part out of the equation as I'm learning) and then place the plastic bottom part of the included tamper in the portafilter and proceed to make a (by weight) around 1.7 ounce double shot in about 27~30 seconds. Not too bad. I don't really like putting the plastic thing on the coffee because it's an extra step when tamping and when I knock out the puck I have to pick out the hot plastic disc. Francis Francis says leaving out the disc 'greatly diminishes' the quality of the coffee you get. Now I'm wondering if anyone here has a Francis x1 and tried with and without the disc and noticed much difference. As I'm still learning my way I'm reluctant to leave it out and mess up big time. Or if anyone has lots of experience with this machine and has some good advice on it.

Thanks in advance,

Tobias

Hi Tobias,

Welcome to the forums! I've personally never used that particular machine but a quick survey of youtube for videos of people using it and I have not seen anyone using the recommended plastic piece. Since it's not a thing that's used in most machines, I would remove it from the equation while you're trying to learn espresso. Just my two cents. Good luck!

My understanding of the FF 2 piece tamper is that the tamping surface is also the shower screen. On the X1 and the X5 that I have worked with the group had a very smaller water dispersion area that appeared to be made for the ESE pods. I think the tamper base/shower screen is needed when using ground coffee, otherwise you get very uneven extractions. The design wants you to tamp and then disengage the handle before seating the PF in the group. I would not call this a good design...but it's what you have to work with at the moment.

Yeah it's a lame design and a waste of time if you ask me. Biggest issue is after it's used on the first extraction it's wet/dirty and interferes with your tamp on the next extraction if you use it as FF explains.

I bought an X5 and although it's a capable machine I didn't like their version of tamping/shower screen design. What I did was remove that screen from the plastic tamper and attached it to the smaller screen on the group. Meaning the water would exit from the boiler via the smaller screen, then spread out to the larger secondary screen below it, next to the puck. I spaced the two screens with 5 very thin stainless washers and a slightly longer screw as to not deform either screen when tightening the assembly. This greatly improved the flow pattern and eliminated what channeling I had before I did this.

For tamping I bought a decent 57mm tamper.

Just did a search and found that others have done the same thing as I did as seen here...

https://www.coffeegeek.com/forums/espre ... nes/103041