Your latte art skill is better than mine , but the milk foam quality is much worse, just as the steam dial performance on my Cremina. You can see there are many bubbles

Not really in my view. They are my daily burr set for both filter and espresso. The latter works fine, but yes, you are in the very fine grind range. However, consistency is great in the espresso range as well. I see no problems producing 1:2 shots from 18 grams of light roast coffees at approx 6.5 bar brew pressure

Only way to get dry pucks is to updose, but that defeats the purpose of a single. My tips: - Don't use the prewet feature if youre pulling Italian roasts - use the LM1 basket - Shoot for a time of 20-25 seconds

Okay, so if I typically dose 18g in the VST basket, are talking like 16g in the Robot?

I find that cold brew is very sensitive to the grind. While "the internet" likes to trivialize cold brew and make it seem like it is easy to throw whatever beans in there, I've found quite the opposite. Too light and you get a weak, acid forward brew that does not dilute well. Too dark and it tastes

So you're likely using a fairly fine grind with that VST basket. If you don't want to change the setting you'd need to dose a bit less in the Robot basket or perhaps pre-infuse for longer

I don't know how I'm finding myself defending this....it's not the way I roast...but Royal Coffee posts different roast profiles for the Bullet (and I assume other roasters) for all of the crown jewels that they sell. You're not getting one sized fits all roast profile. Obviously if you roast under significantly different environmental conditions than they do, you'll

To tack onto Jake's last point: I've been that barista whose perfectly dialed-in shots (to my palate) made a customer scrunch up their nose due to sourness (to their palate). Tolerance and interpretation of bitter and sour are subjective. In the case of a customer telling me that what I interpret as a sweet and well balanced shot is in

Any other thoughts or options?

You're missing the point that everyone is making, you're hung up on the "golden ratio" of 1:2 in 30s, this is simply a ballpark for people who are new to the hobby, start there, sure, but then dial in by flavor. As someone else said, they dial in so that their first drop doesn't even hit the cup until