Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Any coffee geeks here?

A couple things I have discovered. Very important to have a high end grinder. And I have also noticed quite a difference in my grind when I change coffee type. I usually recalibrate when opening a new bag. I use about 14g of ground coffee and should get about 2oz of esspresso in a 23 second pull. If I get more than 2oz my grind is to coarse and less too fine. My experience is there is more tolerance in the tamp than there is in the grind. The 23 seconds is something I read on coffeegeek.com and it has worked well. Pulling longer seems to make the coffee a little bitter. Coffeegeek is a great source and they wont bore you with a bunch a tea talk......

Most good coffee roasters have an espresso blend whick is a dark roast of aribica beans. I try many different roasts and have some personal favorites (Back Cat is very good, Cafe Artigiano in Calgary/Vancouver) but also find Starbucks Espresso blend to be very acceptable.

Hope that helps a bit.

Thanks. I've playing with pull times a bit. I think I like 25 seconds more than 30. Like you mention, the longer extraction time tends to make the shot bitter. I’m not nearly skilled enough with the tamper to target 23. I’m pretty happy if I can get the same grind within 5 seconds.

I'm hesitant to sign up with another forum. I waste way too much time at this one already.

Tea talk is boring, but these guys just need to derail a thread topic. It's a ritual that has to occur for the real discussion to continue. I think it's ran its course.

I’ve been playing around with the idea of roasting my own beans. Looks as if I can get into that without shelling out a bunch of money. Has anyone tried roasting their own beans?

That's a bit personal. Of course, it's not as bad as asking about teabagging.

And I thought THAT was a bit personal.

Do I really need to say it?

Mike drew a big red target on himself, huh?

Roasting beans is easy and the coffee tastes great. You can just roast a few in a fry pan without especially timing them as my wife has to make enough for a pot, although for more precision for your espresso machine and consistent batches you'd want a coffee roaster. We have a coffee roaster and it worked well but I never got around to putting together a proper ventilation system so we haven't used it in a while, you need to vent the smoke out the window with something like a dryer hose, not hard to do, or you can just roast your coffee in the garage with the door open in the summer.

All of the best coffee shops use fresh roasted beans, it makes quite a difference.

Never tried roasting coffee beans before, but it sounds like a propane/gas barbecue might be usefull there. Keep any smoke outside the house too.

LOL..!! Thanks for the laugh fellas, I needed one doday. Ya, I totally set myself up with this group...

I want to laugh too. Does anyone have a doday I can borrow?