Hi,
i'm getting pretty good at dialing in my grinder and machine to get my 2 oz shot in about 28 seconds, but i'm wondering where i can find a guide how to find it for specific roast, like for instance, i'm drinking El salvator beans, i thought theres a place where i read the brewing temp, dosage and how long the shot should be and stuff like that, where can i read about that?

It's the best guide extant

Not shockingly Jim and Dan give good advice above. I will add in though that before one can experiment with temperature one needs to get relatively good at making sure that if you pull the shot with the same dose at the same temp several times in a row the taste is relatively consistent.

I also think it was Chris Tacy who gave good advice in an old thread that one should get good fresh beans that you like (but not necessarily super expensive ones) and spend a lot of time exploring that single blend so at least one variable is fixed. Then when you get to know what it tastes like at various temps, doses, etc you can start to build intuition for how other blends will taste as you pull them in different ways.

Hugh

HB wrote:With all due respect to those who worship ultra-precise brew temperature control, I bracket taste tests into low/medium/medium high/high and go with the one that tastes best. Lower temperatures can produce sourish shots, but they can also be more interesting/fruitful, so it's worth trying, even for lighter roasts. If the taste is too bright, raising the temperature / lowering the dose usually helps.

This is what I used to say when I was using hacked, PID, Cimbali Junior machines that were capable of reliably producing shots within a temperature band of about 1-2 degrees F.

Now that I have owned more controllable machines, 2 different LM GS/3s, for about a year, I have come to exactly the same conclusion. For what it is worth, I tend to switch in between around 198-199F (for DP Ethiopians and Yemens and a few others), and around 201-202 for most S. American beans.

Although not entirely germane to this topic, surprisingly, I also find that with my "Titan level" grinders that I prefer to dose the coffees I like at 198-199F between around 14 and 15g, and the ones I drink at 201-202F tend to get dosed at around 15 or 15.5g (rarely 16g in a cappa). I don't know why but this seems to work for me, and it also seems to reduce grinder adjustments down to near zero as the African DP beans seem to need around the same grind level for ~14g dosing as the S. American WP beans need for 15-15g.

That's my lazy man's guide, and it seems to work for me most of the time.

ken

It is when you get a shot that is both sour and bitter that things get interesting. That is a symptom of channeling and brew temperature. If you have a coffee that is very acidic, try a higher temperature to tame it down. Often (but not always) dark roasts take a cooler temperature. The extraction space can be played with to provide a wide array of results from a single coffee. However, you must be advanced in your technique (or should I say repeatable/stable?) to be able to make use of minute changes in temperature/time/volume to see what a coffee is capable of producing. This is about the only time I pull out the scale to weigh doses.

HB wrote:With all due respect to those who worship ultra-precise brew temperature control, I bracket taste tests into low/medium/medium high/high and go with the one that tastes best. Lower temperatures can produce sourish shots, but they can also be more interesting/fruitful, so it's worth trying, even for lighter roasts. If the taste is too bright, raising the temperature / lowering the dose usually helps.

Out of curiosity, what approximate temperatures do you assign to these relative temperature ranges?

rattaps wrote:... like for instance, i'm drinking El salvator beans, i thought theres a place where i read the brewing temp, dosage and how long the shot should be and stuff like that, where can i read about that?

How to brew your Salvadoran beans will depend on which farm, which crop, how they were processed and warehoused, how old they are, how they were roasted and when and, most important, your own taste.

That being said, I like to know what the roaster had in mind when he/she decided how to roast my beans and, if it's a blend (which it usually is), when the components were chosen. So, when I'm on a first name basis with my supplier (which I always try to be), I usually ask what temperature they recommend. I then use that as a starting point and, if necessary, later make adjustments to my own taste.