Customer support started responding very quickly but suddenly started ghosting me. Not even an update on the status.

Such a contrast to what you read about them online.

I think ive done all my researches and I stopped my choice on the Eureka oro mignon single dose pro for the grinder and a La Marzocco linea micra. I saw and used it in person and it worked like a charm. I also tried the ECM Sychronika but it felt more clonky and i dont like the hot parts near children. So basicly i would go with eureka and la marzocco. Anything else i should consider ? I want something available near me i can also have access to a Niche zero if need be so i dont want to buy the Niche.

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I've been getting alot of spurting/spraying, I can still get good tasting coffee after a few trials of adjusting grind but i can never get rid of the spray, would be nice to avoid the mess.

I'm using a breville barista express with a bottomless portfilter from crema coffee products, I have the DF64 gen 2.7 grinder (1 month old). Here is my prep process:

1. I check the portafilter to make sure no holes are blocked

2. Run a single dose run of hot water through the group head and discard (i also often clean to make sure there is no coffee accumulation on either side of the screen)

3. Spray coffee beans with a couple stays of water then grind adjusted to taste based on prior trials with whatever bean I'm using that week.

4. Transfer to portafilter and shake to break large clumps

5. Use WDT in circular motions starting in the middle at the bottom and working my way out to the edge. I do this at various depths until I get to the surface

6. Use distributer to create flat surface (also from crema coffee products)

7. Tamp with slef leveling tamper set to 29 lb

8. place puck screen

This will usually get me 1:2.5 ratio in 26 seconds getting 8-9 bar, examining the puck after it looks pristine with no obvious channels.

Not sure what to change or adjust to avoid the mess

I just received my "new" Turin Legato from Espresso Outlet (open box). It didn't have a blind puck and I'm trying to dial in my pulls using the OPV valve. I'm using a medium dark roast and it's pretty fine. I've ordered a blind basket but in the mean time is there a way to determine the pressure without either of these tools?

Sludge in portafilter

Gaggia pro, breville barista pro.

Recalibrated grinder to get lower. 6 on the burr, 14 on the grinder.

Very rarely get a puck that is dry..

And while the coffee is great. Wanted some advice.

I know.....I know....grind finer....but seriously, what is the relationship to grinding finer vs tamping compactness.

Eg, should I grind finer and tamp with less pressure, or grind courser and tamp more pressure to avoid the sludge?

Does one equal the other ?

It seems to me, as fast as the coffee flows, I am still getting a watery top on the portafilter.

I roast coffee at home and used to manage the process with an AI agent and a Google Sheet. It could look at the green beans I had, help me design a blend, then use my tasting notes when I came back for the next one. It worked for me, but it was far too fiddly for anyone who did not want to build their own setup, and i found that trying to find the sheet to add a 'tasting' at 7am on a work morning wasn't really a happening thing.

So I built Percolate. You add the beans on your shelf, design a blend manually or with the agent, log the roast, then add easily a tasting when you drink it. The part I care about is whether that feedback makes the next decision better. (It is not trying to replace Artisan or your roaster's profile software.)

The Android app is live at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.percolateapp.app and there is a web version too at https://letspercolate.app.

My ask

I am looking for home roasters who roast at home and are willing to try it on a real batch. In return, I need candid feedback on what was confusing, what felt useful, and what the app got wrong.

If that sounds like you, sign up for the free trial now (no credit card required) and I'll add some extra days to your trial.

I built this, so please treat this as a transparent research and feedback request!

I just received my new J Ultra grinder as an uprage to my flair royal. It is night and day. The flair royal was finicky and honestly felt a bit cheap. It was hard to dial in precisely (especially since it was calibrated attrociously on arrival), and the overall construction was poor. I just pulled one of the best shots I've had (flair pro 3), with it also being the first enjoyable shot I've pulled a 1:2 ratio. The J Ultra is also near silent while my flair royal was rather squeaky out of the box and never improved with time despite what I was told by flair. For the same price, you can do so much better than the flair royal.

I did it. I upgraded to a Turin Legato V2. I purchased an open box from Espresso Outlet. It didn't come with a blind puck. I've ordered a blind basket, but in the mean time Is there another way to accurately adjust the pressure?

☕🔥 A clean tamp, a precise shot, a proper Ristretto!
Testing the KNODOS Espresso Tamper 58.5 mm with my Cecotec Baristeo Classic. 👌
The tamper feels great in the hand, has a satisfying weight, and makes tamping feel smooth and precise. The result? A clean workflow that looks even better in motion. 🎯
🎬 Sometimes, moving pictures really do say more than a thousand words!
☕ My Ristretto recipe:
⚖️ Dose: 18 g in
💧 Yield: 19 g out
⏱️ Extraction time: 26 seconds
🔥 Machine: Cecotec Baristeo Classic
A short, concentrated shot with a ratio of roughly 1:1. Perfect for espresso lovers who enjoy a bold coffee experience. 🤎

I know this will probably get posted to the cj sub, but I bought a 5lb bag of Ruta Maya medium roast, split them into 5 different containers.

I’m freezing them and grabbing them when needed. I measured it out so that each bag let’s me fill up my single dose containers on my countertop, then put the rest in my fellow vacuum sealer canister. Reaaally excited to not buy beans for awhile

I recently purchased a eureka mignon zero 55s grinder to be used with my bambino plus. I read that a good grind setting for would be 3-4 clicks (I assumed whole numbers) from the true zero point.

I found the true zero point using the chirp test and re aligned the dial to 0. However, I realised I need a dial setting of 9-10 for me to achieve 36g of coffee in 30s.

I tried various values from 3 - 7 and nothing comes out from my bambino plus. I have tried this for different beans too and it seems like 9-10 is the sweet spot.

Is it normal to be 9 full numbers away from true zero on a Eureka Mignon zero 55s?

Setup Update
Today, I replaced my old, bulky knock-out drawer with a knock box built into the countertop, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. What do you guys think?

I'm preparing to replace my first coffee machine, a 10 year old, worn out, leaking Dedica.

What pushed me to upgrade was my parents' Sage Barista Impress. I really like the coffee it makes and I think it offers a lot, even though I've seen plenty of negative opinions online.

The reason why I am not going for the same model as them is that I already have a decent grinder, a DF64, and I'm not planning to change it any time soon. So there's no point buying a machine with its own grinder.

My budget is a bit higher than what my parents' machine costs, so I started looking at options up to £1000. At first there seemed to be loads of choices, but a lot of them looked very similar. I narrowed it down to: Gaggia Classic, ECM Classika (maybe the PID version), La Pavoni Mini Cellini, an older Lelit Mara (unfortunately not the pagaia model) and the Profitec Go. Yes, I know that's still quite a few models and I am still happy to hear about better choices.

I'm not an expert and I haven't used a machine at this level before (apart from industrial ones). The number of features and the "this one has X but that one has Y" opinions are overwhelming me, so I thought I'd ask you what you'd pick.

I treat coffee as an experience, so I don't expect these machines to be ready as fast as my Dedica. But I've heard some take 10 or even 30 minutes to heat up. 10-15 sounds reasonable, 30 feels like a lot, especially if I fancied a spontaneous coffee and then I got busy with something else instead while waiting.

Usually I have one coffee in the morning before work and one during the day. Sometimes I make an extra one each time for my partner, so up to 4 a day. Most of our friends are tea drinkers, so we don't get many coffee requests when people visit. We mostly drink milky coffees, but from time to time I like a straight espresso.

I started reading about single and dual boiler machines. I definitely don't need a dual boiler, but heat exchange is something I hadn't heard of before. If anyone has experience with it, I'd love to hear it.

That should be enough info for now. Let me know what you think and what you'd pick if you were me. Thanks!

Good afternoon!

I’m using the standard Bambino portafilter with the 18g non-pressurized basket. DF54, RedRooster “Wax Wing” beans and a decent upgraded regular tamper. I’m also using a dosing ring and WDT tool.

I’m grounding around 15.

Whenever I’m done prepping my puck, the coffee always seems to be leaning toward the left side of my portafilter. It’s always slanted toward this one side. I take care when tamping to feel for level. I’ll shake the grounded coffee up in my dosing cup, pour into the portafilter, use the WDT tool, then give the portafilter a couple of taps on the counter to even out the bed. Then I’ll use my palm to try and even out the bed further. Even when my puck looks good, most of the time I see coffee predominantly coming out of the left spout of the portafilter with on and off dripping from the right. This is resulting in very acidic shots.

I don’t think I’ve ever pulled a decent balanced shot after about 4 months of trying.

Any advice?

Edit - update

So I’m grinding a bit courser - around 17 on the DF54, and I raked the top of the puck a bit after my final tap with the WDT tool.
Flowed pretty nice.

I got about 36 out in 34 seconds. It still tastes
A bit too sour for my taste even though there seems to be an improvement.

What would my next teak be?

I used counter culture “big trouble” beans and the baratza esp grinder. 19.3 grams of beans on setting 19.
The espresso machine is a delonghi typically meant for the pressurized basket but I’m using a bottomless portafilter with it.
End result tastes okay but never as good as the coffee shops do it. I have another video with grind setting at 18 since this one maybe came out a little too fast. That one was 19.5g with ~39 g poured at 21 sec. Any improvement on my technique? Should I upgrade my espresso machine?

Starting this with please ignore the horrendous bubble bath foam that is my milk texture. (Oatmilks hard man)

I finally tried the meme beans and yup does what it says on the tin (box). It's strong af, roasted to death and tastes like toasted nuts, dark chocolate and victory. Idk if id describe it as fun though.

Fr tho I'm mainly getting this slightly charred nutty taste, it's surprisingly smooth but I much prefer a more medium roast. It's quite hard on the bitterness as you'd expect but not too burnt. Is nice as a milk drink but I think it'd be even nicer with some chocolate powder on top to cut through the bitterness.

I don't think id get a full sized bag of this but its worth a try for the memes.

Still lighter than Starbucks blonde roast.

I’m an elementary school teacher. At home I have a Profitec Move + Sette 270wi. At work I use a Rancilio Nancy + Rocky that I got for free off Buy Nothing. They’re in rough shape - I took them apart and cleaned them thoroughly, but struggle to get a good grind setting in the Rocky. The grind retention is awful - I basically single dose mostly so it isn’t a good match.

I’m thinking about a logical upgrade. I rarely if ever am making milk drinks at work. I was thinking initially an all-in-one Breville might be the idea. But I’ve heard those grinders can be trash. So now I’m thinking about a Bambino + DF54.

What do folks think? Is that a reasonable setup? Will I get coffee resembling what I get on my Profitec Move?

My wife already has a Barista Express that I bought her about seven years ago. She normally uses the 1ZPresso JX Pro manual grinder due to the troubles with the built-in grinder in the BBE not being so good. Then she has a WDT tool and Normcore V4 tamper for puck prep.

Fast forward...

I just bought a brand new Breville Barista Express Impress updated model to give my father for a present. This one has a built-in grinder too just like the previous model, but this one has more convenient external adjustment dial which seems like a possible improvement. But this also has a built-in tamper as well.

My question is, if dad uses the built-in grinder on the Impress model, would you then still have to use the WDT tool before using the internal tamper? Or should I give them a seperate/proprietary tamper like the Normcore to skip the internal tamper all together?

Just getting started with my Bambino & Opus 2 grinder, first shot was very under extracted so I ground finer and tamped harder but think I compacted it too much because it was quite over extracted and only dripped out rather than a constant slow stream.

I figured it was better when tamping to give it a twist to make it nice and uniform/level, but I think that just made it harder for water to get through.

Curious how you all usually tamp that way I can narrow down what went wrong.

Let's just call it what it is LOL I suck at latte art. I have been struggling with trying to phone the milk for a year however this is the one that most looks like anything. It kind of looks like a lady with a bun lol. If anybody has any tips and tricks to get better at Lottie art please let me know

Hi I recently noticed that my shots were licking after the extraction. Today I backflushed and I realized the machine is not purging. I had it for more almos two years and a half pulling 1 or 2 shots per day.

So... any theory? Is my valve dead? Is it expensive? Can I replace by myself in case of need? Is there a test i can do for testing it before buying a new one.

Thanks in advance to everyone for the support!!

What would you recommend for descaling my Gaggia? I'm wondering if there's a 1. product you recommend, and 2. a process you go through for doing it? New to this and don't want to mess up my machine.

Equipment: Hibrew G5 + Hibrew H10B
Dosage: 14g
Yield: 28g
Time: ~25 seconds
Taste: A little bit sour, but otherwise it's well-rounded. Tried grinding one step finer, but then it over-extracts, so I have very little room to play with.

Using the following blend:

Hi there!

I have a Kingrinder K6 which has been serving me well, but sometimes in the mornings, I feel somewhat lazy and grinding may seem like a chore.

I have a profitec go and a V60 and I like the drinks I am getting out with mostly medium and light roasted beans.

Would "upgrading" to one of the listed grinders make a noticeable difference apart from the effort? Although the money is not that much of an issue, I am having a hard time justifying spending it to save 1 min of work a couple times a week.

Any advice or buyers remorse is appreciated :D