The shots this morning was much better. The admiral even suggested that she was almost enjoying the coffee (she must be acquiring the taste for coffee). I'm not sure how long I can leave them before they go stale, but I'll most certainly leave them for 24 hours next time I roast them.

I'm glad you're enjoying it. How exciting traveling in a van! If we weren't doing the boat thing, we'd be doing the van thing! The Hive is a wonderful piece of gear that does exactly what it claims.

I'm sure you'll have a bit of an easier time than I'm having due to less humidity.

As for an update. The latest batch has now been depleted. I'll be roasting another batch in the morning. I'll double back to the roast the admiral enjoyed best in espresso form (I use the term enjoy loosely here). I dare say she might be turning into a coffee drinker yet, which will make justifying the gear much easier...

I'll continue to update on the quality of the roast from the stored greens. At this rate I'll have to order more greens soon, the admiral has already started looking at different types and wants to try at least one more of the blends on offer...

I roasted yet another batch this morning. The greens are definitely still holding up well. I'm starting to get better milk on the Bellman too... I use a small cafelat pitcher (300ml or something) and it seems super powerful in such a small pitcher. Still not getting latte art quality milk, but hey it's pretty damn good for how and where it gets produced, might also have to do with the milk powder though...

Day 2 of the current batch. We might get an extra day out of these for test purposes. There was only 2 shots consumed yesterday. Great taste in the cup so things are still looking pretty good.

As for the bellman, still un-modded and frankly it's producing decent milk. I think it's just a case of managing the air insides it and using it to your advantage rather than fight it. I've still only used powdered milk and I have to say it's not bad. I just about managed to pour latte art.

I haven't refilled it since I started using it, it's about half full now and it heats up in time for the second shot (which is the milky one), so the workflow is surely getting there... My main concern was the time it would take, with that coming down now and an understanding of the machine the concern is less. I'm thinking I could probably use 1/4 of the water that's suggested and it would be plenty and heat up quickly (use less LPG).

I'm in a fairly happy place with espresso gear right now. The only thing I might want to consider is a digital scale to help with dosing, that might stretch the beans further by dosing consistently and roasting consistent quantities. weighing output might help with the milky coffee taste as I just go by what it looks like visually, so strength could be anywhere on the chart as there's no consistent ratio to milk. But this is absolutely non-essential.

Weighing your coffee green and roasted will also give you some idea of the degree of roast of your coffee going forward and help with the consistency of your roasts.

Day 3 of latest batch, well they're gone now. Still held up well.

I'll roast another batch later today and post results on greens, I estimate that I'm about half way through the greens I purchased. Just over 3 weeks and things are still going great. By my calculation I should order about 10kg's worth of beans in a week or two.

Feels a bit risky with that much beans, but so far so good! The only way to test it is to try it...

Roasted up another batch and a half (I had half a cup of beans left on one blend). Roasting up two lots is a lot of effort on the Hive. I thought about doing a third, but that's just madness.

The roasts seems ok, I pulled one shot for the admiral and it didn't seem to go down any worse than the others. I'll be able to tell more once I have an espresso in the morning. I roasted another of the "in your face" beans and hope they will settle in a day or 2's time. I'm hoping that the extra beans will go another day further so I can track the development of the beans over time.

At this rate I'll be out of green beans soon, I ordered another 8kg's worth of beans, 5 kg in the blend I like the most and the rest in 500gm samples.

The journey continues...

well it was bound to happen, bad coffee today. It's sour. I know I didn't grind too fine or coarse, the pressure was good. I'm fairly certain the the second shot had some channeling in it based on the location where the coffee came out. So under extraction is my main suspect. The real question is now around my greens... I could have maybe applied too much pressure to the levers, possible, not sure how likely.

I've only got enough for one more shot on this batch so it would be hard to troubleshoot it...

This could get interesting...

sour (and channeling also) can also mean underdeveloping your roast or even not resting it long enough but also can mean you are overdosing.

Extraction; measure how long it takes aiming for 30-40 sec extraction, water temperature is critical so try a bit hotter water/preheating