I found the main source of my sourness; uneven extraction, but not from puck prep. I just modded the opv to have 9-10 bars of pressure and it was the same. So I just looked at the shower screen and it was flowing like a river on one side and like rain drops on the other. How does that happen?

benddd wrote:
The issue is there is so much channeling going on all the time and the cups never look clean after pulling shots there is just splatter everywhere. The only way to remedy this is to go extremely fine and the shot looks much cleaner, just doesn't taste good.

If you are getting bad channeling, grinding finer isn't going to make it better. It might slow the flow enough to make it less obvious, but it's not getting better. You need to fix you distribution problems. I will agree with those that say using a toothpick for your wdt may be doing more harm than good. Find something skinnier.

benddd wrote:I found the main source of my sourness; uneven extraction, but not from puck prep. I just modded the opv to have 9-10 bars of pressure and it was the same. So I just looked at the shower screen and it was flowing like a river on one side and like rain drops on the other. How does that happen?

take your screen off and make sure it is clean, and no sign of physical damage. Also make sure your machine is level.

benddd wrote:I found the main source of my sourness; uneven extraction, but not from puck prep. I just modded the opv to have 9-10 bars of pressure and it was the same. So I just looked at the shower screen and it was flowing like a river on one side and like rain drops on the other. How does that happen?

BBE has a water dispenser with only one hole like this while better machines have multiple holes like this. The metal shower screen below disperses it a bit but you still get one sided flow. It's a well known issue. Possible workarounds:
- Tamp harder
- Place a paper filter above the puck.

If you manage to avoid severe channeling (i'm not sure it's the main issue here) and still get sour shots, I would try to measure the water temp with a fast thermocouple ($20) and make sure it's in the ballpark (93+C). These machines are not known for temperature consistency.

K7 wrote:BBE has a water dispenser with only one hole like this while better machines have multiple holes like this.

Ouch! OK, that isn't great.

Another approach, being explored by some of the major espresso geeks (for somewhat different reasons), is the BPlus or Flair screen. This may help with water distribution, or might just be an expensive path to try.

If you do decide to try it, you may need to reduce your dose slightly as it is a few mm thick. People are still mixed over if it should be tamped with the coffee, or dropped onto a tamped puck.

Jeff wrote:Ouch! OK, that isn't great.

Another approach, being explored by some of the major espresso geeks (for somewhat different reasons), is the BPlus or Flair screen. This may help with water distribution,

Ha, didn't know they had a 53mm version. I think it will likely help a little in terms of evening out extraction on average, but I'm afraid the OP's sourness is from either another type, more severe channeling or simply temperature not being high enough.

When I had the BBE, I would sometimes see a little dimple or a hole on the spent puck near the location of the water dispenser hole and it drove me nuts. However, to be honest, I really couldn't correlate the appearance of those puck dimple/hole to poor cup results nor the bottomless pour appearance. I now suspect the dimples/holes might have been just due to the 3-way solenoid sucking in water through the same hole after the shot. But, still, no doubt the dispenser design is suboptimal.

or might just be an expensive path to try.

That's the thing with this machine. You keep working around one shortcoming after another but in the end one has to ask when does it end.

Honestly I've tried every single prep known to man to make sure I get the most even extraction and even tried a filter on top of the puck and still nothings changed. It shouldn't be this hard to pull a good shot of espresso..
On another note, modding the opv to make the machine brew at 9 bars of pressure backfired hard as it now won't wont brew for more than 15 seconds ( with or without a puck prepped ) even after resetting it to factory setting. Gonna have to wait a few days to get it fixed but even when it was brewing at 9 bars the espresso was noticebly better but still had this sourness/saltyness that really had no place there..

Ill look into a thermometer to make sure water is up to temp as well, this machine let me down so much already and I wouldn't be surprised if the temp is not as advertised.

benddd wrote:Honestly I've tried every single prep known to man to make sure I get the most even extraction and even tried a filter on top of the puck and still nothings changed. It shouldn't be this hard to pull a good shot of espresso..
On another note, modding the opv to make the machine brew at 9 bars of pressure backfired hard as it now won't wont brew for more than 15 seconds ( with or without a puck prepped ) even after resetting it to factory setting. Gonna have to wait a few days to get it fixed but even when it was brewing at 9 bars the espresso was noticebly better but still had this sourness/saltyness that really had no place there..

Are you using the automatic shot volume function when you pull a shot? Or controlling it manually? If you are on the auto mode, premature shot ending may be just due to the large amount of water diverted to the drip tray by the new OPV setting (another BBE shortcoming) and the machine using wrong estimation of shot volume (yet another shortcoming) based on the flow meter located before the OPV i.e. it doesn't know about the diverted water volume. I suggest you use the manual mode to end the shot. See the user's manual for details. Also, see if longer pre-infusion helps.

In the end, you will probably find that the OPV on that machine is not meant to be tweaked from the factory setting (15 bar) because adjusting it introduces other major problems like water being wasted and, more importantly, messes up its brew temperature management even more, sadly (water now too hot).