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Watched a guy in Lisbon pull a shot with no timer and it fixed my sour espresso problems
Two months ago I was pulling shots that tasted like burnt lemon no matter what I did with my grind. An old barista in Lisbon let me watch him work and he just used his eyes and ears, no scale, no timer, and the shot ran for maybe 22 seconds. I tried it at home for a month and my shots got way better because I was actually tasting instead of staring at numbers. Turns out I was chasing a formula instead of paying attention to what the coffee was doing. Anyone here ever ditched the scale for a while and had it help?
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gavin_kim317d ago
My buddy Dave did this exact thing last summer. He was pulling 18g in and 36g out like clockwork but his shots always tasted flat, and he could not figure out why. His machine was a Gaggia Classic and he had a cheap scale that was actually off by like 2 grams, so all his numbers were lies anyway. He tossed the scale in a drawer for three weeks and just went by color and how the stream looked, watching for that honey drip to turn blonde. Shots got sweeter right away because he stopped cutting them off at some magic number and started pulling until the taste said stop. He still checks weight once a week now but mostly for consistency, not as the thing that runs the shot.
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