Unless you go once near a beach and a single grain of sand gets past the airtight bag the phone was in and the Totally-IP67-We-Swear phone chassis and is fucking destroys the screen from the inside, with a repair bill worthy of a new phone because “that kind of damage is not under warranty”.

Source : happened to one of my best friends. Fuck you with a folding dildo, Samsung.

As someone who lives in an extremely hard water area, citric acid is your friend. It looks like a giant kettle after all.

Oh nice, this should be what I’m looking for. Bigger energy costs but much less waste water. And available in Europe!

This water will end up in my espresso machine’s boiler, I doubt anything really harmful would survive several hours a day at 95C.

Yeah, well the water here is so hard that using a boiler once is enough to have it all scaled up. Like opaque white in a single use.

Honestly, no idea. It’s written on the jugs that it’s improper for human consumption and destined to be used in appliances. It might just be that it’s not been certified, or maybe the general processing chain is not food grade. I dunno. Or maybe because it’s been demineralized it lacks the chemicals considered “essential” for drinking water.

Uniformity is everything my man.

A blade grinder will break your beans in random sizes. You will have big chunks with almost zero extraction (basically wasted) up to super fine powder that will get grossly over extracted (bitterness to the max), and everything in between.

A good burr grinder helps keeping everything “in the middle”, so you can get a much more controlled extraction.

I don’t know about this 50$ Costco grinder but if it’s electric, it will be shit. You won’t find any decent grinder, even straight from China like a DF64 for less than 350.

Your best bet for constrained budgets is a good mid-range manual grinder from 1zpresso. It will be night and day compared to your blade grinder.

Honestly, you won’t find any electric espresso machine at that 100$ price point that’s capable of producing decent espresso, and they’re usually a pain to use. They are plastic, disposable and cobbled together with the absolute cheapest parts as possible. Heating is bad, pressure is all over the place and build quality is inexistant.

Your best bet at that price point for real espresso would probably be a (used) Flair or Cafelat Robot. Of course these come with their own workflow and caveats and they are hard to master, but short of spending at least 5 times your budget on a well maintained, second-hand mid-range Gaggia or Lelit or equivalent, you won’t find anything remotely as capable at producing real espresso.

Yeah probably. I don’t care. I’m so fucking angry right now.

Thanks!

TBH I didn’t start roasting because of time or money considerations. It’s just another hobby that aligns with the coffee-obsessive lifestyle. The fact that it might eventually become more cost effective than buying roasted beans was definitely not the highest in my list of priorities :D

Grind settings are widely different for each bean, it’s normal. Depends on a lot of factors (origin, variety, altitude, roast etc).

Lighter roasts tend to need slightly longer ratios (~1:2.5 to ~1:3.5), darker roasts shorter ratios (~1:2). Faster shots (20-25s) are usually fine.

As for channeling issues, puck prep is of paramount importance but I’m not sure how much prep you can introduce in this machine’s workflow. Counterintuitively, channeling is often caused by grinding too fine, but the water rushing in the channels actually make the shot much faster. If you can WDT between grinding and tamping, it would solve a lot of issues.

I mean, it’s just a quick soapy sponge wipe and you should clean your moka pot after each use anyway.

It’s stainless steel, so Puly Caff.

This is a perfectly valid point of view, and for the first few months, I seriously doubted I could ever match a decent roaster. Now I can make exquisite coffee. Meh coffee too, don’t get me wrong. But the more I learn, the more I can trust my instincts, the more I’m able to unlock some potential by tweaking temperature or time into 1C. Some beans still elude me (I had a Sidamo that smelled heavenly when green but that I could never roast properly), but it’s, I think, true for most roasters except the very best. For me it’s the ultimate step into complete coffee obsession. You need to truly know your beans to roast them properly. And then I can still play with grind size and temperature and pressure and time when pulling shots to make the best out of them.

I image if ventilated safely and well it likely gives off a rewarding aroma too?

Once the smoke is gone from the kitchen, the smell of freshly roasted coffee lingering in the house for the rest of the day… Man this is just heaven, makes you crave a nice cup instantly.

Infinite quality/price ratio!

Haha what changed?

Add a bit of oil as a “thermal paste”/interface between the adapter and the pot. I use a tiny frying pan as an adapter for my Turkish cevze and it’s night and day.

Funny, I bought the same model yesterday on a clearance sale 😅

Still figuring it out too, I might use it as a travel brewer next to my Flair and/or my wife’s Aeropress.

As an aside I tested all the parts with a magnet and it’s full stainless, so you can thoroughly clean it with PulyCaff or Cafiza unlike Aluminium ones.

Yay for full stainless steel! You can fully clean it with Cafiza/Pulycaff for a perfect cup!

Absolute madman.

(Ok I know it’s super normal and traditional in some places like Ethiopia, but super fresh beans are horrible it’s like licking an ashtray, you need to rest them at least a few days/weeks)