Morning Gentlepeople.

As a coffee newbie I am having some small issues while trying to improve my game. I have a Oracle Touch and subscrube to a local monthly coffee delivery, so my beans change weekly.

My issue is that the grind setting is incredibly different from bean to bean. With my last bag, grind 14 gave a perfect 1:2,5 ratio. With a different bean today, I had to discard two cups before learning that grind size 3 gave me the same ratio. 14 gave me 1:3,5 which tasted rubbish.

The problem is that I got channeling and very little crema.

I guess the questions are: do different beans require completely different ratios or am I doing something very wrong?
Should I accept a very high ratio to avoid channeling on certain beans?
Or should my timer be lower on certain beans?

Thanks in advance for any help and have a great cup this morning!

  • viking
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    2 months ago

    James Hoffman has a great video (or even series I believe) on “dialing in” espresso machines, definitely worth watching.

    That’s also my key criticism with buying subscription coffee, often they send quantities that are too small to get to a meaningful brewing routine. I’ve had a gifted subscription for 150g monthly, and I was going through 30-40g just perfecting the output. So by that time I was left with enough coffee for 2 weeks and had to resort to alternative sources.