Hi all,
A while ago I was looking for videos on here to help grasp the concept of blonding. I found it challenging to find HD videos here and on youtube showing the stages of extraction. I stumbled upon this tonight by accident. I hope it helps someone.

Thanks it is a good video helps a lot

Randy

I guess if your into that sort of thing... pulling by appearance (especially with a spouted PF) seems to leave a lot to chance and variable...

What do you mean? What other method(s) would you use to know when to stop the shot?

I'm pretty new here and just learning, so thanks.

Many people use a set of digital scales to go by a ratio of dose:drink, e.g. 1:2 is a useful starting point for lightly roasted coffees and 1:1.5 for slightly darker styles, etc.

Sorry yes. I am in the camp of pulling to a specific ratio by weight onto a scale. Also prefer a bottomless so I can see distribution errors.

That said. Much more experienced baristas might be able to pull better shots by visual cues! I can not.

I can't even definitively say when a shot blonds, especially given the variety of colors tied to roast level.

watching for blonding is great for medium or darker roasts but goes out the window for light roasts. My light roast SOEs and Blends start to wiggle around halfway through and are light colored. Stopping it there would be a super intense slap your face shot. IF I want a smoother shot, I will have to continue til I hit my desired ratio.

Thanks for posting the video. I really enjoyed watching it. But I am still in the same boat I was in before - I simply cannot see any specific point where I can say "it's starting to blond". I've never been able to and have always found it confusing. I can certainly see the gradually changing texture/color from the start of the pour to the thin and watery over-extracted ... but it is always a gradient and never a specific point where I should end it. It is helpful for me to watch (I always use a bottomless) and if I were to see some obvious problem where it channels and gushes out I'd stop it --- but I generally stop my shot based on volume/time and how it tasted the last time with this particular coffee.

I think this is the result of a completely subjective endeavor. I bet if you asked 5 baristas on the same shot when it went blond you would get 5 different answers. Maybe close to each other in brew ratio / time, maybe not.

Thanks all,

I asked such a basic question because after a bunch of time, reading, effort, coffee and money, I am still left wondering how to know when to stop an extraction. The replies to the video made me wonder how other people are doing it. Let me explain:

Since I started down the road of making my own espresso, I have read many things from different sources on the internet. A lot of the more comprehensive posts or how-to's on here make reference to stopping the shot by color. A lot of these posts seem older.

The newer information I see here, or on other places around the inter-webs, make reference to recipes: grams dosed to grams extracted. It seems that, as time progressed, some of the people on here that wrote about stoping the shot by color, became open to stoping it by weight too.

There's also stuff on the inter-webs about using refractometers, but I haven't digested that stuff yet. I probably will not for some time. Hopefully I don't go that far down the rabbit hole.

When I was first learning, I tried to digest the stuff about blonding, but I was stumped. It seemed that people making videos or talking about it, were able to discern color variations that I could not differentiate. Some of the replies to my post make this same point. I tried to search for more up-to-date, HD videos so I could see better but nothing really helped.

Leaving this behind, and searching for something more objective, I bought a .01 gram scale and looked for coffees that had recipes that I could follow or looked on here for in/out recipes that were working for other people. This worked, for the most part, but sometimes, using a recipe that worked for the roaster or someone else, I still could not get a shot to taste the way I knew it could. These boards are full of posts by people looking for help as they face the same issue pulling any particular coffee. Digging deeper, I read that many experienced people here and some roasters advocate recipes as a starting point and that people should and will need to tweak these recipes based on their equipment, water, coffee age, amount of pets in the house, etc.

I also found some coffees didn't come with recipes, or that the recipes provided were confusing because they are not written using parallel measures, i.e.: mass for dose, liquid volume for extraction. Most of these recipes seem to have been written when the espresso zeitgeist had not fully understood the implications of using scales and what could or should be done.

For a long time, I bought 5 lbs of Redbird at a time and used that one coffee to learn my stuff. I am now venturing out of the nest and trying other coffees. As I struggle to pull the best shot I can, with the information and recipes we have from roasters and each other in 2017 while producing the least amount of waste, I revisited the concept of blonding as a way to know when to stop the shot.

My idea is to weigh my dose, pull the shot and weigh the shot that I think tastes best giving me the recipe that works best for me and my gear. I would only go through all this trouble when I was having significant trouble. I was looking for information on blonding as a way to to get in the ballpark for when to stop the shot to begin this process. My greater hope was that blonding would be THE sign of when the shot would taste its best and by learning it, I would be free from having to move my scale to the drip tray.

It seems like most of you have had the same trouble discerning blonding as I have. Nice to know I am not alone.

I hope this made sense. I welcome thoughts and feedback. Thanks to everyone for your participation all the contributions that have been made in our shared pursuit.

edit: I have also found that cutting a shot into thirds for fourths, helps to understand the effects of extraction time on flavors in the cup.