petje wrote:Hello all.
I have ordered a ECM CEllini a week ago. so very soon finally i will enter the world of the home barista.
Is there a list of priorities that i have to keep in mind to get started the right way?
This webpage has an excellent resources section. Jim Schulman's
Espresso Guide is an excellent overview of everything that you need to know and is well and truly worth reading. That should be your first priority.
I will intersperse some more stuff as answers to your other questions, but my general comment would be that you shouldn't be afraid to burn through a lot of coffee and milk to get things right at the beginning. Buying a kilogram of coffee and just making a whole bunch of espresso shots in a weekend will be the fastest way to improve your consistency - be sure to measure both the volume and the time of your shots. The same goes for milk; pick up three litres and just steam through it. This may seem wasteful to you, but if you go and pay money to do a training course, this is exactly what you will do. The only difference is that you will pay more to have someone actually help you out whilst you do it. A training course is probably the fastest way to get comfortable with your machine but, even then, you will get more out of it if you have already had a thorough practice session at home.
Get a good grinder the fastest way possible? What is a good grinder? what is a good price range? doser or doserless?
There are many good grinders out there. Again, HB is your friend - go and read the
feature spotlight on espresso grinders. However, beware that it might not cover all of your options. For example, I don't think that the US really gets the compak grinders.
Personally, I think that a grinder with a stepless adjustment mechanism is essential. I don't think that there is any clear cut answer to doser vs doserless. For starters, some dosers are better than others and some doserless chutes are better than others. Both dosers and doserless grinders have their own merits. Personally, I'm using a mazzer mini and that's fine for me.
Get good water? filtering? bottled water? (the calcium is very high here, so deff no tap water in the machine i guess)
The giottos that I have tried required a relatively large cooling flush before brewing ... more than five seconds, IIRC. This would make bottled water an expensive proposition. Perhaps you could fit a filter into your kitchen tap or something.
Coffee? how to know what good coffee is?
Get a freshly roasted blend from a knowledgeable local roastery. Choose a blend that they use in their machine so that you can taste it to develop a frame of reference. Ask them when it was roasted and what its optimum period is. Plan accordingly to have some on hand. Stick with mainly using that blend for the first three months to build up consistency.
How to NOT screw up the machine =reading the manual i guess. Other things not in the manual i have to know?
You should really wade through the
Resources section of this site.
How important is the tamper? How much should it cost? Concaved or flat or is that an issue i won't have to deal with the first months? I expect to need a lot of time actually learnig to tune the machine and get normal espresso out of it.
IMHO, people make way too much of a fuss over tampers. For me, the most important thing is that tampers fit the hand comfortably. People have different sized hands and hold tampers differently, so it's probably worthwhile going somewhere where you can actually put your hands on the tamper that you might want to buy. Convex vs flat ... well, I have a bunch of mild convex tampers, but I'm yet to believe that the difference that the curve makes is huge. For what it's worth, I have a few coffeelabs, a pullman, an espro and a bumper tamper. The coffeelab and the espro see the most use.
I am really excited, but also a bit nervous. There is so much to know about making espresso, i don't know what to prioritize. anyone?
Finding a decent roastery is probably the most important thing. Your local high-quality roastery/espresso bar will quickly become your lifeline, as they provide you with the requisite excellent beans and great coffee as a benchmark for your own. If you let us know which city you're in, I'm sure that someone will be able to recommend some places to try out.
If you still feel intimidated after significant experimentation on your own, you might want to think about seeing if there is a decent training program near you that you could do.
One final thought ... and I hate to throw a spanner in the works for you, but I thought that the stock filter baskets that ECM machines come with over here are a bit small. This makes it more difficult to extract a good shot. It might be an idea to see if you could buy some bigger filter baskets for your machine.
Hope that helps,
Luca
by petje on Fri Apr 06, 2007 3:30 am 
