I've had a Cormorant since late 2018. It's a great roaster that's easy to roast with. I have one of those stories where I shared the coffee with a few friends and they asked me to start roasting for them. I roasted 454g on it consistently because it nets around 345g of roasted coffee (12 oz)

Probably the surest way to see if your machine is the problem would be to make espresso on another machine, preferably another linea or at least a good dual boiler machine, using the same water supply beans, machine and grinder settings (boiler temp and pressure mainly), and puck prep to see if there really is a significant difference in coffee

What about the machines I mentioned in the previous comment, where pump pressure is not adjustable but there's an OPV? In those cases the pump is also not a rotary one, if that makes a difference

I find it easier to reinstall if I orient the cam so that the smaller lobe is presented towards the ends of the valves while I wiggle it into place. The large lobe gets hung up on the valve ends. Our Puristika has the weak spring

Thanks for shedding some light on what I just looked at as a black box. It makes more sense now. I still prefer full strength Pavlis recipe at this point but am looking forward to more A/B tests

Yes. Set your pump pressure to 12 bar and then adjust your grind until you have 8.5 or 9 bar at the puck. You will find that the shots need to be in the 12-17s range to get anywhere close to this low of a brew pressure when the pump is set that high. Cheers! -

That reference advises Gently wiggle it a bit and it will go in once the cam is in the correct position. That's the part I am having difficulty with

From HB member Randy Glass {link}

You don't need a spray bottle - which people can overdo RDT with anyway. Use a spoon as James Hoffmann demonstrates: - or use a chopstick or your pinkie finger{video}As for feed rates, it is mostly about keeping a constant feed rate throughout the grinding session. Too aggressive a feed mechanism can overload the burrs during grinding - force too

With the soft preinfusion springs of my ECM machines I could wiggle it in there in the «middle» position without further disassembly. With Bianca with the stiff spring bypassing the flow chamber for flow control I usually loosened the lower exhaust pipe but didn't take it completely off