one small step for me, one rather gargantuan leap for the much smarter people!
July 15, 2005 – 1:59 pmwell. offer one teensy bit of experimental advice, and you find that coffee nerds elsewhere have eclipsed your meager thermoprobe setup with an ingenius temp gauge setup that taps directly into the brew tube. add to that the utterly fascinating discussions on shot clarity as a result of mitigating the tiniest fluctuations of brew pressure caused by a machine’s pump …. and you have a brave new world.
vital context reading here.
aside from the usual “new-domains-have-been-breached” giddiness that comes with the discovery and clear delineation of controllable espresso factors — and the measurable improvements they bring — it sees to me that the primary fallout lessons speak to the even higher level of skill and attentiveness incumbent on a user of the e61-heat-exchanger home machines that can, in turn, produce shots of certain blends that are near competition-worthy and even single-origin espressos that meet and surpass commercial machine output.
if true (and here i rely heavily on the opinions of the applicable pros), the imperative is simple: practice. burn through a lot of coffee. ingest. did someone say ‘maniacal’?
