In this video, I am going to make the same espresso using several different presets,
several different espresso profiles built into the machine.
And we can talk about how the results are different,
and we can look at the shots and see what we think, see what comes out best.
So the shot I'm going to be making is always going to use 15 grams of coffee,
and I'm going to aim for about 30 grams out into the cup.
The first time we're going to do, we're going to do with the default profile,
which is here.
And the default profile is our standard pre-infusion, rises to 8.6 bars and then slowly declines to 6 bars.
Let's see what that gives.
Now, this is also a temperature of 88°C.
One thing I forgot to do is to put a cup here - that's definitely going to make a difference!
You'll notice that the scale tares automatically to 0;
as long as you put a cup in before the espresso starts, you're fine.
So here we are, the espresso's starting, the temperatures, they're running.
I'm going to click to zoom.
The pressure is rising as pre-infusion ends.
And then you can see the shot coming in.
And we've risen to 8.5 bars, here's the shot happening.
The thing about this shot is that it has a pre-infusion, and then it goes up to 8.6 bars and then slowly declines.
Okay?
And the shot's continuing continuing, and it should stop shortly automatically.
Boom.
Okay?
32 grams is what this was set to.
Now, let's take a look at this shot and see what was good and what was not good about it.
Now what I can tell you is the flow rate here dip down
and then augmented as we went.
Not hugely, it looked pretty good,
but it did take a little bit of time here for the flow into the cup,
which was the brown line, to match the flow that was going into the puck, which is the blue line.
We'll also note the pre-infusion was fairly fast, took 11 seconds.
The pre-infusion on this espresso machine automatically exits when a certain pressure is reached,
that's how it detects the end of preinfusion.
And this is set to - let's see what it is set to - it is set to a 4 bar exit.
And that is in fact what happened, it's as we hit 4 bars - this line here - we switched to pressure shot.
Okay?
The other thing I'll note about this is that they did speed up,
and they went from about 1 ml/s to 1.5 ml/s
But all in all, a actually fairly successful shot,
and you can see it doesn't look bad at all.
Let's now do the same shot, but with flow profiling.
So this is the flow profile for milky drinks.
This has the same pre-infusion speed. The main difference with this is this is a flow-controlled shot.
So instead of rising to 8.6 bars,
it's going to try and maintain a 2 ml/s flow rate and the pressure will automatically be controlled.
Now, this should look similar to the previous shot.
Okay?
But you can see our flow rate is just way too high on this, right?
Because we were previously doing a 1 to 1.5 ml/s flow rate.
We're asking the machine to do 2, and it can't actually do it. So the pressure has gone sky-high to 11 bars.
And as the puck is degrading, the flow rate is able to pick up, and the pressure decreases.
So I would say this shot is too high pressure.
Now, I might like the flavor, but it's too high pressure.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to drop the goal flow rate for this shot,
and we should be able to get into a pressure between 7 and 9 bars by doing that.
Before we start, we're going to change the flow profile,
so that this part here is a bit slower.
Now, remember we were between 1 and 1.5 bars per second with the previous shot.
So let's try and maintain that - let's just pick an average between the two.
The other thing is is I'm not so happy about how fast that pre-infusion is happening,
so I'm going to slow this pre-infusion down,
and all I'm doing there is slowing the rate of water flow into the puck during pre-infusion.
Okay, so here's pressure rising,
and you see we're just a few seconds later to reach our end of pre-infusion,
but actually not that different.
And, in fact, in this shot I'm not that happy with this,
because see how long it took for the coffee to come out?
This is a slow rise in flow.
Yet the flow. Sorry a slow rise in flow into the cup. Whereas we are slow
there was a slow rise of water flow into the cup, yet a constant flow of water into the coffee puck.
So if you look at this area here,
that means that the coffee puck was extracting in an unequal, uneven manner,
because more water is coming in then coming out until about 25 seconds when, finally, the two are equal.
So this to me is a pre-infusion that was not successful.
The other thing that's interesting about this is
see how the pressure rose to 8 bars?
And then, as the puck eroded, the machine automatically adjusted pressure down to 4.7 bars
and then kept it there in order to maintain a stable flow.
So the main thing I would do with this shot that is different
is I would slow down that pre-infusion still a little bit more,
because I would like to get rid of this gap between the blue and the brown line.
So one more shot.
As I mentioned a few minutes ago, we're going to lower the pre-infusion flow here
but otherwise, we're not going to change much.
So down again from 3.5 ml/s to 3 ml/s,
and let's see if that helps pre-infusion be more successful.
Otherwise, no change.
So here's pressure rising during pre-infusion,
and you can see it's taking longer for that pre-infusion to end.
We were at about 14 seconds for that to happen.
And a little bit better in terms of our brown to blue line,
but still, improvement could be made there.
Now probably that's because there's still some more water to come in.
We could raise this trigger to 7 bars and get pre-infusion to land a little bit longer
But, nonetheless, I'd say this is a pretty successful shot:
we rose to a little over 8 bars, descended to a little under 5 bars, and it looks pretty good.
Now, the last shot I'm going to do is a pressure shot,
and that's what I mostly use for this coffee.
And the reason is you're going to see that because we're
instead of decreasing from 4 ml/s to 2 ml/s, we're instead aiming for a pressure rise,
that pre-infusion end is going to look a bit different.
And we're going to match the blue and the brown line much quicker.
So the final one we're going to do now is the one I've been tweaking for quite a while.
It is called the Euro Caff.
It's called the Euro Caff profile. That's the name I gave it on my own machine,
and the main thing you'll see here is 1) I have a pre-infusion exit that's higher than the others -
before, it's been 4 bars, and now I'm exiting a 6 bars.
So that pre-infusion is going to last just a few more seconds.
The other thing that I'm doing is I'm then rising to 8 bars of pressure and then slowly declining.
Historically this shot has been the best-tasting of all the various techniques for this bean,
and this is a medium- roasted bean. It isn't burnt-tasting, but it doesn't have light floral characteristics either.
It's mostly chocolatey tasting,
and I'm aiming for layers of pleasant chocolate, but no darkness.
If I'm really lucky, I'll get some red wine flavor out of this as well.
So here we are with our pre infusion starting, the pressure starting to rise as pre infusion is ending.
And that is the longest pre infusion of all of them,
and we are at 14 about 13 seconds there for pre-infusion.
You can see the blue and the brown line met very quickly,
and they're tracking each other. So this is an extraction where all the water in is yielding water out,
we don't have an uneven extraction at all.
And I have the pressure declining; I have timed this previously,
so that just as the flow is starting to rise at a higher level than I'm comfortable with,
- which, in my case, is 1.5 ml/s -
I then have the pressure starting to decline,
and that has the effect of lowering the flow rate, both in and out.
And that hopefully will give you an idea of
the characteristics of different profiles on the Decent Espresso Machine and how you might change it
to establish the flavor that you're looking for.
No espressos were harmed in the making of this video.