Those videos don't look that bad to me, really. Its hard to tell color from a video, but it appears to be quite light beans.

Light roasted single origin is very demanding of the barista and the equipment. I see you are home roasting, so keep in mind having a roast that is well developed enough to work well for espresso extraction but is still light is a challenging target even for the pros. And even when everything is perfect it doesn't have the same body and crema as a medium to dark espresso blend. The rule of thumb to get more body is updose and grind more coarsely, but that's generally the opposite of what you want to do for light beans flavor wise.

My suggestion is get your hands on a well regarded commercially roasted medium to dark espresso blend. Something like Caffe Lusso Gran Miscela Carmo would be a good choice, but you can find plenty of other recommendations on the forum. Get to where you can pull that well and figure out your equipment before you try lighter roasts.

Thanks for sharing and taking the time to put videos up.

My first thought was how old are the beans you are using? The light color of crema on top of the shot seems like it is either old beans, or the machine has not warmed up. Another is a dull grinder but your grinder is new. Even a very fast shot time will give darker crema.

Do you know the roast date of the beans?

The crema or top layer of a shot should be dark red-brown even with tiger stripes or spots. I'll see if I can find a photo to show you.
Even this one is a bit on the light side of crema color.

21 grams in a VST triple basket bottomless portafilter - typically around 22 - 28 seconds... which is a bit fast for 21 grams.
But this is my personal preference.





Thanks!
Dwight

My $0.02

As some mentioned, you can have some light roasts that will never pull "good" especially with high extraction baskets like VST & Decent Baskets.
EPHQ 14g baskets have helped me in that regards but still the pours are ugly. Right now I found a flat 4.5ml/s flow with a coarse espresso grind to get a 1:5 ratio in about 30-35 seconds works best for me (Allonge). Harder (impossible to do) on your machine because you can't control flow.

So, if you are going to try do light roast espresso, it's kind of a challenge to get it tasty. Grind finer, pre-infuse longer, and go for a faster flow shot.

I'd recommend to try roasting a friendly Guatamala or Colombian bean to like a medium roast without developing the roasty flavors and playing around with that.

I went through a phase with my home roasts where 80% of my shots were terrible and would channel shortly after, they tasted good though but mentally it was challenge to get over it since all we see on youtube or posted are beautiful pours. In that case buy/order just one bag of an espresso blend from a good local cafe in California or roastery online. If you're in San Diego I have some excellent recommendations and get those beautiful yummy looking pours with body and creaminess to it so you are confident/reassured that it is NOT your fault of grinder or machine and you can blame the beans

Work on puck prep as others mentioned. I don't remember the last time I just grinded and tamped. You should have a workflow down with a form of puck rake tool to prep your puck before tamping.

Bluenoser wrote:I can see what you mean in your videos.. I notice "dead spots" in the basket.. and in #2, it looks like the right side is channeling quite a bit. I would say that your biggest problem might be distribution and puck prep (and maybe some coolness in the brew water temp)

First.. I'm not sure I'd try to preinfuse that way.. I don't think you are doing any harm.. but there is some preinfustion built into the design of the E61 head and the characteristic of a vibe pump which comes up to pressure slowly. The method you are using is just inconsistent and at this point, I'd keep a simpler workflow until you get a better extraction.

There's a few things I had to do to my Pro500 when I got it.. I reduced the pressure down to about 8-8.5 bar.. To do this, use a blind filter basket and pull a blind shot and if you have the case off, you can turn a screw in back to set the pressure on the gauge to 9 to 9.5. The puck pressure will be about 1 bar less. This can help reduce channeling as it won't put as much pressure on the puck.

The biggest suggestion I can make is in doing WDT.. get a needle like object and stir the heck out of the grinds in the basket (what basket are you using.. the Pro500 stock? VST? ..) I found when I moved to a VST basket from the stock Profitec double basket that I had to perform much more puck prep. So stir to ensure there are no clumps and then rap/tap to level the bed and then tamp. Don't use a thick tool as you don't want the stirring to compact the grinds in any way. It looks like your puck does not have consistent density.. When this happens, you see dead spots, your stream blonds early and you get sour, thin extractions. You might want to adjust tamp pressure.. try 15lbs.. then 25 .. just to see if there is a difference.

When pulling, just lift the lever to take the manual preinfusion variable out of the list of things that might be causing some bad stuff to happen.

Lighter roasts need a hotter brew water temp and the water might need more contact time (grind a bit finer). Now do you have a group thermometer? If not.. how are you ensuring your brew water is hot enough? I'm in the camp that think all HX designs (other than MaraX) need group thermometers so you know where your brew water temp is.. It is difficult to know what your flush routine is but if your brew water is too cool, your water won't dissolve the good stuff in a light roast. (depending on how light) So the quick blonding will happen if your water is too cool. Are you letting your machine heat up for 45 minutes before using? (then flushing to cool the group?)

Reducing the pressure somewhat might also help to extract lighter roasts.

Some Profitec Pro 500s suffer from slow rebound (I have one).. Sometimes if you pull successive shots too quickly (within 3 minutes) then the thermosiphon might not have heated up enough for the next shot. If you do a second shot and you are doing a flush.. if there is no "water dance" indicating steaming water, you might not have a hot enough temp for the successive shots and they could be cool. Sometimes on successive shots there is no need to flush.. easy to tell if you have a group thermometer.. tougher without.

BTW.. it took me 6 months to get something that tasted good.. I had a lot of issues with brew water temp.. so hang in there.. the HX designs take a bit more work to master.. and you will need to experiment more than you would with a DualBoiler .. You'll eventually learn more about HX designs than you wanted..

Incredibly helpful, thank you. It's good to hear from a PP 500 owner about the quicks of the machine too.

I'm didn't do that 45 degree "preinfusion" that is not really a true preinfusion. I actually got a better result this morning. It may have been the result of backflushing the machine the night before. (Per WLL's Wiki, it's supposed to be done every week, I waited two because I had to wait for the Cafiza to be delivered.)

See here: This is how the grouphead flow looked like after the cleaning. Is this normal? It went from a shower to what looks like a single stream or even cone. My pressure gauge is current set at 10 bar, which means it's delivering about 9 bar of pressure internally, which is ideal, non?

I do the WDT with a toothpick before I tamp down. I do find it makes a big difference.

I'm using the PP500-branded bottomless pf. There's a line at the top, which I think is the suggested grind amount line.

I don't have a group thermometer, so I'm just trusting that the PID isn't lying to me, lol. I have the machine plugged into a wifi Wemo outlet, so it turns on about an hour before I'm ready to pull a shot.

Nate42 wrote:Those videos don't look that bad to me, really. Its hard to tell color from a video, but it appears to be quite light beans.

Light roasted single origin is very demanding of the barista and the equipment. I see you are home roasting, so keep in mind having a roast that is well developed enough to work well for espresso extraction but is still light is a challenging target even for the pros. And even when everything is perfect it doesn't have the same body and crema as a medium to dark espresso blend. The rule of thumb to get more body is updose and grind more coarsely, but that's generally the opposite of what you want to do for light beans flavor wise.

My suggestion is get your hands on a well regarded commercially roasted medium to dark espresso blend. Something like Caffe Lusso Gran Miscela Carmo would be a good choice, but you can find plenty of other recommendations on the forum. Get to where you can pull that well and figure out your equipment before you try lighter roasts.

Wow, really! I think the shots lacked body from the beginning, but I'm glad you hear you think they were OK!

On my next batch of beans, I'm going to try to allow the roast to darken a bit. I do anticipate it being difficult to get something that's adequate for an espresso. I mostly roast because it's much too expensive to buy $20 12oz bags of coffee on a weekly basis! But I'll do it a handful of times to test drill down on my technique.

dwightand1 wrote:Thanks for sharing and taking the time to put videos up.

My first thought was how old are the beans you are using? The light color of crema on top of the shot seems like it is either old beans, or the machine has not warmed up. Another is a dull grinder but your grinder is new. Even a very fast shot time will give darker crema.

Do you know the roast date of the beans?

The crema or top layer of a shot should be dark red-brown even with tiger stripes or spots. I'll see if I can find a photo to show you.
Even this one is a bit on the light side of crema color.

21 grams in a VST triple basket bottomless portafilter - typically around 22 - 28 seconds... which is a bit fast for 21 grams.
But this is my personal preference.

image



Thanks!
Dwight

Thanks for taking the time to respond! Really great community here.

The beans were about a week old, roasted last Saturday. So I believe it's less about the freshness or age of the bean. I am believe it's the lightness of the roast.

Wow, you have a VAT of crema there! Very impressive.

tvc15 wrote:I'm using the PP500-branded bottomless pf. There's a line at the top, which I think is the suggested grind amount line.

Dosing by weight, preferably to within 0.1 g repeatability, is considered by many to be best practice for a home barista.

tvc15 wrote:I don't have a group thermometer, so I'm just trusting that the PID isn't lying to me, lol. I have the machine plugged into a wifi Wemo outlet, so it turns on about an hour before I'm ready to pull a shot.

Letting your machine warm up completely (40-60 minutes) is a good idea.

The E61 group and its thermosiphon in HX designs is an elegant bit of late 50s engineering that works well when a barista is pulling shots at a constant rate and with dark-roasted coffees of that era. It's a balance of the heat pouring off the group, heat coming in through the thermosiphon, hot water in the thermosiphon (which is in the brew path), cold water replacing that in the thermosiphon, the mix being heated by the big chunk of brass on the way to the basket, cooling the group down down, then the whole cycle repeating. The brew temperature isn't the steam boiler temperature (usually around 125°C, 250°F), PID controlled or not. If you're pulling, say, a shot every 60 seconds, you can "tune" it so you're always at the same point in the cycle, for some moderate temperature stability once you get going.

Home use doesn't follow this pattern, so something like the EricS group-head thermometer is required to get close to the correct and repeatable temperature. It works by measuring the temperature in the group head's brew channel, within an inch or so of the puck. You create a new rhythm by flushing "cold" water through the system and then either hitting the same point in the cycle on the way down ("flush and go") or when it starts to come back up ("flush and wait"). Edit: You can become very accurate and repeatable with this, ±0.5°C if you're obsessive about it, comparable to or better than most E61-style, PID-controlled dual boilers. One of the early threads to discuss this is Monitoring Brew Temperature - E61 Groups

So you have the Pro500 PID.. me too.. so here's what I found.. Don't trust the manual.. It will say to set the PID to 248F to get 200F out of the group. That was nowhere near correct on my machine. I had to set the PID to about 252 to 254F. But the only way to tell where your group temperature is at, is with a group thermometer (ie: EricS). Without that, you are just guessing at what your brew water temp is.. And thus if you are setting your PID to 248F, you are likely getting water that is too cool to extract light roasts properly. This is what happened to me for the first 6 months with this machine. Finally I broke down and bought a group thermometer and only then did my extractions improve.

Also on this model, I get very slow rebound. That is.. I can't pull successive shots before about 10 minutes. Here's how my machine works.

I set PID to 254 and turn on and wait 45 minutes. Group idles about 200F. If my house is warm (summer heat wave) it might idle at 202F. If it is idling at 202, I flush for about 5 seconds and wait for about 3 minutes. The group temp will dip and then come up. I prep basket during the 3 min. I pull shot. My brew water is about 200F. Now over the next 3 minutes the group temperature will dive for 5 degrees. Then it takes about 7 minutes for it to come back up to 200F.. sometimes about 12 minutes.. so my next shot can't be pulled at the same exact brew water temp for 10-15 minutes. The only way you will know if your machine rebounds quicker is with a group thermometer. The curse of the HX design. If you are pulling successive shots on your machine within 5 minutes, it could be that by the time you get to shot #3, it might be 10F cooler than you want.

The table in the manual is wrong and its stated warm up time in the manual is wrong. Actually from other owners, each Pro500 works slightly differently because the thermosiphon loop is likely circulating slightly differently. It is not an exact science. One model might rebound in 13 minutes.. another in 7.

Don't dose by using the line in the PF, get a scale and measure out the grinds.. For the stock double basket, about 16g is a good dose. If you dose by volume, you'll be too inconsistent when switching from one bean to another. Weigh dose in and the result out.. So maybe go for 32g out in about 28sec. (Just lift lever, don't preinfuse manually, it throws timings off at this point).

Brew water temperature management is the toughest things for the Pro500 PID in my experience. The whole.. "add a PID to an HX and the brew water is rock solid" is totally marketing hype and not correct. Even though this is promoted by WLL and Clive. The PID keeps the boiler temperature rock solid, but this water is not your brew water. You are then depending on a thermosiphon tube flowing at some exact rate and hoping it gives you 200F water.. but even if it magically does give you 200F, the E61 will then influence the water temp as it is a big thermal mass. If your E61 is cool, it will drag your brew water down.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTDWMQr9SlQ This link is from a German review of this machine.. Now you likely won't understand it, but they actually think their Pro500 PID machine is broken because the taste is bad. (looks like one of the reviewers is a barista). They wonder if it a "Monday" machine But what is happening to them could be the same as you.. The brew water temp is too low. So they get out a SCACE (expensive) and measure the brew water, then adjust their PID up significantly to get their brew water to the desired temp.. likely about 200F.

Your machine could behave totally different than mine and the one in the video.. or it might be similar.. hard to know without measuring the brew water temp. Many people own HX designs without using a group thermometer. If you have a good palate, you can adjust the pid temp by taste.. just dial up, down.. wait 15 minutes or so and try an extraction.. keep the dose in and out consistent.

Such is the learning curve on an HX design..

I did a whole pile of measurements on mine here: HX-PID SCACE measurements (Profitec Pro 500)

tvc15 wrote:Single origin that I roast myself. The beans I used for these vids were roughly a week old.

You should probably do some "debugging" using a commonly available commercial espresso blend. If just to eliminate one possible variable.

+1 for trying a commercial roast to compare against. I mainly extract light roast, with great success, and I'm using a Pavoni. As for roasting you can find lots of tips on this forum on how to nail a proper light roast.