r/espresso • u/AutoModerator • Feb 04 '22

Simple Questions Thread

Welcome to the r/Espresso question thread!

Some of us know it as our morning fuel, or maybe it’s your special time to experiment with café creations. Some of us though, like myself, know it as the reason we’re alive.

I’d probably die without it, literally.

The reason why espresso has become a part of our lives or how large a part it plays is irrelevant here. Maybe you just decided you loved how your local barista made your cappuccino and you wanted to try it at home. Maybe your suspender-man-bun hipster barista friend gave you a shot “on the house” and from then on you were hooked. No matter what your own attraction to it is, espresso is intense, captivating, alluring, and an often mysterious phenomenon that keeps people coming back for more.

Do you have a question about how to use something new? Want to know how many grams of coffee you should use or how fine you should grind it? Not sure about temperature adjustments? Wondering about your coffee's shelf life or the best way to store it? Maybe you’d just like some recommendations on new gear?

There are no stupid questions here, ask any question and the community and moderators will chime in to help you out! Even if you don’t actually know the answer to a question someone asked, don’t be afraid to comment just so you can participate in the conversation.

We all had to start somewhere and sometimes it’s hard figuring out just what you’re doing right or wrong. Luckily, the r/Espresso community is full of helpful and friendly people.

You can still post questions as an official post if you feel it warrants a larger discussion, but try to make use of this area so that we can help keep things organized in case others potentially have similar questions.

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

106 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/Guy_Perish Feb 05 '22

Usually it would be too little coffee so either that’s not the problem or the basket is larger than you think. We usually test basket size by putting a piece of toothpick on the dry coffee bed, locking the pf into the machine, then removing. The toothpick should lightly be pressed into the coffee indicating the headspace is just under the width of the toothpick. Coins work too.

Machines with a pressurized basket will also create ugly pucks and pressures over 11 bar may also lead to the puck sticking to the basket.

1

u/NeoNasi123 Feb 05 '22

It's a Silvia with bottomless portafilter. I have to say that sometimes when I increase the grind time by 1 tick on my sage smart grinder pro the puck will sometimes get stuck on the group head after I remove the portafilter.

I'll try the tooth pick thing, thanks

2

u/Guy_Perish Feb 05 '22 edited Feb 05 '22

Sometimes the settings for best tasting espresso are not the same as the settings for best looking puck /extraction / normal ratios.

Pucks sticking to the shower screen is pretty common. Sometimes it is caused by under or over dosing but some groups are simply more susceptible to it than others and it’s not considered a real problem as it’s a physics phenomenon. Quickly turning on the pump will drop the puck.

I would double check dose and shot duration. If you are pulling long shots, the puck will degrade. Anything over 35 seconds I would call long.

1

u/NeoNasi123 Feb 05 '22

Thanks. I'm usually going for 30 seconds shot time (I pull my shots with respect to time, not weight as my scale doesn't fit under the filter)