How to Adjust Espresso Grind? How to Plan Coffee Shop Morning Calibration? How to Perfect Espresso in Three Shots?

Why Morning Espresso Calibration is Essential

Because coffee beans themselves are affected by external environments and the loss of their own gases, their state changes constantly, which will alter the taste of coffee extracted with the same parameters. To ensure that the coffee extracted the next day has the same delicious flavor as the previous day, morning espresso calibration is an essential step. The specific method is: make corresponding adjustments to extraction parameters based on the beans' changes, and finally list the extraction formula suitable for the current espresso.

The Challenge of Finding the Right Extraction Parameters

However, 5 cups, 8 cups, 10 cups, or even more—many friends spend nearly half a bag of beans during morning calibration just to barely find suitable extraction parameters. Not only is this extremely costly, but they also end up drinking so much coffee they nearly get caffeine poisoning. Why does this phenomenon occur? FrontStreet Coffee also experienced this many times when first starting out; it can be said to be a minefield that every beginner must step on. The root cause is not finding where the problem lies, only blindly adjusting the grind setting. Therefore, FrontStreet Coffee wants to share today how to quickly find the espresso extraction formula! If you can understand the following details, just 3 shots! Only 3 shots are needed to find today's espresso extraction formula!

I. Don't Overly Rely on Adjusting Grind

Morning espresso calibration has always emphasized grind adjustment. While grind size is certainly important, FrontStreet Coffee does not recommend everyone overly relying on changes brought by grinding. Because adjusting the grind size consumes a lot of materials and time—just cleaning the grinder requires using many beans. Therefore, adjusting the grind is a last resort when extraction time shows significant deviation, not a choice that can quickly solve problems.

Dose and liquid weight are adjustable parameter ranges. When the extraction time using yesterday's parameters doesn't change much, we can adjust the dose or liquid weight based on taste changes (there's a chance no adjustment is needed at all if it tastes the same as yesterday, or even better). Only when the time variation is too large should we proceed with grind adjustments.

II. Learn to Identify Coffee's Flaws

Ideally, espresso should exhibit a balance of sweet, sour, and bitter in taste, with high body and smoothness in texture. This requires the coffee to have an appropriate extraction yield and concentration. When the extraction yield or concentration is below standard or exceeds it, the flavor balance will be broken, and the texture will exhibit negative sensations such as thinness or astringency.

Therefore, we need to understand where a coffee's flaws come from! Is it under-extracted or over-extracted; is the concentration not high enough or too high. Once we identify the flaws, we only need to apply corresponding correction methods. Then an ideal espresso can be born! Let me give you an example! This dark roast espresso tastes somewhat sour, even a bit sharp—that's a typical under-extraction phenomenon. We can increase the extraction yield by reducing the dose or increasing the liquid weight based on the original formula, and the coffee's taste will be corrected! The same applies to other situations!

III. Precautions When Adjusting Grind

If we find that with the same dose, the extraction time differs too much from the previous day, it means we need to adjust the grind. When adjusting the grind, we need to pay attention to two things, otherwise it will greatly increase the difficulty of your adjustment!

1. Different Adjustment Scales

Single-origin grinders have many setting levels because single-origin extraction doesn't have extremely high requirements for coffee powder (relatively speaking, compared to espresso extraction), so their adjustment range can be larger, generally with 0.5 as one level. Espresso grinders are different—because the ground particles are finer and extraction is more extreme, even small changes in coffee particle size will greatly affect extraction. Therefore, their levels are generally set at 0.2 per increment!

When adjusting, friends should avoid turning a large circle at once, as this can easily cause the machine to "not recover" due to excessive adjustment range, leading to prolonged idle time without grinding beans, and the ground particle size can easily deviate far from the target, increasing adjustment difficulty.

2. Remove Residual Coffee from Grinder

When we grind, the grinder doesn't release all ground coffee powder; some powder gets stuck in the burrs because it can't exit in time. FrontStreet Coffee specifically conducted an experiment: after clearing all coffee beans from the machine, we took out the coffee powder stuck inside, and it amounted to about 4 grams.

So if we don't bring out this portion of coffee powder when adjusting the grind, it will mix with your next dose of coffee powder—half old, half new—causing significant extraction deviations. Therefore, generally after adjusting the grind, we'll pre-grind about 10g of coffee powder to bring out the residual powder remaining in the grinder. In summary, as long as we understand these three things, we can quickly find the espresso extraction formula for today based on our original foundation.

Final Tips from FrontStreet Coffee

Finally, FrontStreet Coffee would like to mention three more details:

1. Pressure Stabilization

When there's too much time between extractions, some coffee machines' pressure will fluctuate—in other words, become unstable. This will cause certain variables in the first extraction after restarting, until pressure is restored to normal operation and extraction returns to normal. Generally, we would choose to directly discard one shot of coffee for pressure "preheating," but a friend of FrontStreet Coffee provided an excellent idea: you can use a blind basket to pre-activate the pressure for about 10 seconds, and the coffee machine can enter normal state for extraction! Testing has confirmed this is indeed effective, everyone can use this method to reduce the waste of one dose of coffee powder and avoid extraction misguidance. (Blind basket: a special portafilter basket without holes)

2. Formula Recalibration

The formula is not universally applicable throughout the day. Coffee beans and the environment are constantly changing, so it's best to recalibrate every few hours.

3. Initial Setup Guidelines

For friends who have just gotten a coffee machine, you can set your dose, time, and liquid weight based on your portafilter basket specifications and the beans' roast degree, then adjust based on these established parameters. If you're not familiar with this, you can check FrontStreet Coffee's previous articles—we won't elaborate too much here~

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Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473