How Much Impact Does Misaligned Coffee Equipment Have on Extraction?

Is Your Coffee Equipment Level?

Sometimes, coffee may taste improperly extracted, but your brewing technique or extraction parameters haven't deviated. In such cases, we should pay attention to whether the equipment remains level during coffee extraction!

How Important is Equipment Levelness?

As stated in Scott Rao's book "The Professional Barista's Handbook": "Keeping coffee equipment level may seem trivial, but it's actually crucial!"

When coffee equipment isn't level, this tilted state will directly cause numerous uncontrollable effects on extraction! Such as over-extraction, uneven extraction, etc. Let's look at what levelness issues in daily coffee making might affect extraction that we need to pay attention to!

Coffee Machine Body Levelness

This is a detail that's easily overlooked! Because many people assume their desktop is level, they think placing the coffee machine directly on it will naturally be level. This is indeed true, but over time, many hollow/wooden desktops may develop slight depressions or tilts.

(Water droplets that should fall evenly tilt to the right, converging into a water stream) These tilts will cause the coffee machine to become crooked as well, and then! The water stream from the brew head will also form a tilted state! Because there's a gap between the brew head and the coffee puck, initially, hot water won't directly contact the puck but will flow to the lower side due to inertia!

This portion of coffee powder that first contacts hot water will be extracted first. Although this may only last a few seconds, for an espresso machine, it's enough time to form channels and create extraction deviations! Therefore, when we have time, we can take out a level or use the phone's built-in level to measure and calibrate the coffee machine's levelness, eliminating issues that might cause extraction deviations.

Even Tamping Pressure

The evenness of tamping we often talk about is also part of keeping extraction level. If force is uneven when compressing the coffee puck, it will create a "slope-shaped" puck with front/back or left/right tilts.

Similarly, water will flow to the lower part of the puck due to inertia. The coffee powder at the lower concentrated area will develop channeling effects from being extracted first. Therefore, when tamping, maintain a vertical downward position, concentrate force on the center, which will minimize uneven force application like crooked tamping!

Filter Cup Levelness

Normally, slight tilting of pour-over filter cups won't significantly affect extraction. Of course, this refers to slight tilts caused by desktop inclination that are visually undetectable. But if the tilt is visible to the naked eye, then attention is needed! This will cause hot water to concentrate on extracting the powder layer in the vertical path, making it difficult for coffee powder above the tilt angle to receive sufficient extraction, thus leading to uneven extraction!

This situation most commonly occurs with filter cups without bases that use bases without fixed corners (Origami filter cup & wooden holder: they don't secure the cup properly). Because the base doesn't have corners to fix the filter cup, it can move around freely during brewing! So when we see the filter cup in a visibly tilted state, we should make appropriate adjustments to ensure the coffee powder can be extracted evenly!

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