Hello all,

I have been having trouble dialing in grind and brew parameters for a house espresso blend (i guess they call it citizens?) from Demitasse in LA (little tokyo and santa monica). On my baratza vario, I am grinding beans 5 days post-roast at 1-E, which (with my vario calibration) is several clicks finer than practically any other espresso blend I've tried. I'm using 20 grams in my breville dual boiler tapered basket, WDT, then tamping at 30. Preinfusion is just the breville default, 7 sec at 60%. The extraction begins evenly at 9.5 bar in my naked pf with a nice moderate brown color but then quickly blondes and sputters, yielding 1.5-2 oz of coffee in a short 15 seconds or so of brew time at full pump pressure. I don't generally have serious dosing/distribution problems with other beans, and i am decently meticulous about it, so i am a bit confused.

has anyone else experienced any similar troubles with demitasse beans, or does what i am describing sound like a user-dependent issue?

thanks!

You came to the right place. Russel will be able to help you sort this out. He's an active member.

What happens at coarser grind settings? I've often found that experts make grind adjustments that seem counter-intuitive to me. For example, I look at a shot that pours too fast and generally assume that the grind needs to be tightened. However, if the grind is too tight already, the fast pour could be due to the fact that the pump pressure is blasting a channel in the puck. In this case, the correct response to the fast pour is to grind coarser.

It might be worth a try until you hear from Russel or someone familiar with this espresso blend.

Good point. I have indeed tried this, and went coarser and then much coarser. Both led to massive underextractions. Complicating this is the fact that the breville stock basket is tapered, making it unforgiving with underdosing--maybe 20 g isn't quite enough. I'll keep trying, I suppose...

do you have a smaller dose basket?

if not, updose the basket that you're using now.

at the cafe, we use a vst 15 gram basket and typically fill it with 18-18.5grams.

also, this blend is tasting better at a lower temperature. try around 196-197f and pull longer shots. 32-35 seconds yielding about 28gram output is about the sweet spot.

thanks for the tips, frank! i updosed to 21 g and got much better results. I will try lowering the temperature--i was brewing it hotter because the roast looked light. i may try a smaller filter basket--but my stock breville dual boiler "single shot" filter basket has yet more sharply tapered walls, making me quite a bit less confident about my tamping.

and i hate to admit it, but i don't have a scale hefty enough to weigh my espresso cup with the pulled shot. (the scale i use for single dosing goes up to 100g with a tolerance of 0.01. should have gone with the 1000 by 0.1.) will have to get a beefier scale to weigh my shots! kudos to demitasse for weighing their espresso shots unabashedly.

frank, are you mostly in little tokyo or sm?

i don't have a scale hefty enough to weigh my espresso cup with the pulled shot. (the scale i use for single dosing goes up to 100g with a tolerance of 0.01.

Generally speaking, you put your espresso cup or shot glass or stainless steel catch cup on the scale, then press tare-to zero out the scale-then go through your shot routine with the scale on the drip grate. So you are only using the scale to weigh 20 or 30 grams, which is well within its design parameters. This is also the process used in some commercial settings, certainly for dialing things in.

FWIW: I have a 550 gram scale (±0.1 g). While my espresso cup weighs 144 grams, my stainless steel catch cup is under 50 grams. So you could use your scale with a stainless cup without overloading it, then pour off into your drinking cup.

sqroot3 wrote:thanks for the tips, frank! i updosed to 21 g and got much better results. I will try lowering the temperature--i was brewing it hotter because the roast looked light. i may try a smaller filter basket--but my stock breville dual boiler "single shot" filter basket has yet more sharply tapered walls, making me quite a bit less confident about my tamping.

and i hate to admit it, but i don't have a scale hefty enough to weigh my espresso cup with the pulled shot. (the scale i use for single dosing goes up to 100g with a tolerance of 0.01. should have gone with the 1000 by 0.1.) will have to get a beefier scale to weigh my shots! kudos to demitasse for weighing their espresso shots unabashedly.

frank, are you mostly in little tokyo or sm?

hey no problem! let me know if u have any other questions.

btw, i'm at the little tokyo location

cool, frank!

good point, eastside--yeah, i understand how to do the weighing but i was hesitant to put my (likely) 100+ g demitasse on the scale. even if i do zero it with the demitasse on board, the total mass on the weighing plate will likely exceed spec (doesn't matter if the calculated/zeroed mass reads 20g), and that is likely no bueno for the scale. but the stainless will do the trick as you describe!

Oh man...called out by name and Frank still beats me to the punch. We've found that basket geometry plays a big role in the quality of our shots, especially when we moved from Equator spro to our own much lighter blends. I think Frank can confirm that we up dose out baskets as a rule, so a 15g VST will get at least 18g. At one point we tried conforming to the baskets "rated" capacities and only one barista preferred the results.

We sell the plugin version of a very popular 0.1g scale in the shops...let me look into something before you buy...

thanks, very informative!!