Home Espresso Tips & Tricks: a Guide

This one is for all the home baristas out there! In this blog post, we’re diving into some helpful tips and tricks for making delicious espresso drinks at home.

Tip #1: Start with good coffee. Set yourself up for success! Of course we think ours is the best, but there are so many good specialty coffee roasters out there: invest in quality beans.

And make sure they’re within a good time frame past the roast date. You can read more about why this matters here, but just note that the roast date does affect the quality and consistency of your espresso. You want it to be around two weeks past the roast date.

Another thing to note here is that you should never mix coffee dates! Even if it’s the same coffee, mixing the dates in your hopper will make it very hard to dial in and cause inconsistencies.

Tip #2: Espresso is a very changeable thing: every variable in the process of pulling a shot can change the espresso greatly. So our tip is get yourself into a flow that works for you and feels comfortable, and never change it. That way when your espresso suddenly pulls way too fast or is tricky to dial in you can be certain that you’re not doing anything to cause these changes.

An example of a good flow is this: take the portafilter out of the grouphead, dry it, place it on the scale and tare the scale, grind coffee into the portafilter, weigh it and adjust if need be, distribute coffee, tamp, carefully place portafilter into group head, pull shot.

Like we said, you can find whatever flow works best for you. The one above is just an example, but the key is to never deviate. That way you know something else is causing the variables in your coffee.

Trick #3: Become very familiar with your equipment. Get to know your grinders and become super comfortable with your espresso machine. This will help you recognize changes in your espresso and diagnose if they might be equipment related.

For example, if you know your grinder has the common quirk of keeping one or two doses already ground it the chamber, you can recognize that the first shot you pull of the day or in a few hours will be slow. That coffee sitting in the chamber is cold and maybe a little stale. It will slow down the extraction process. Knowing this quirk will save you a lot of trouble as you will know to dump that first shot rather than make an adjustment to your grind size. You’ll pull another shot first, and that freshly ground coffee will pull much faster. You will thank yourself for knowing your grinder so well that you didn’t make a premature adjustment to the coffee.

Tip #4: This is the most important tip of all! In order to be an amazing barista and pull the best shots of espresso, you must taste everything!

The more you taste shots of espresso, the better you will become at recognizing different characteristics and dailing in. Taste the shots that pull too fast and too slow; taste the shots that pull perfectly to recipe; taste shots from different cafes. You’ll notice that you’ll become better at tasting when a coffee is under-extracted or over-extracted. You’ll become better at identifying different tasting notes in specific coffees, and then you can adjust according to what you want to highlight in your espresso.

Just try as many espressos as you can and dial in your palette! What a fun task, huh?

Like many aspects of the coffee world, espresso has a lot of grey areas. Yes, there are things you should always do like tamp or weigh your coffee. But there are a lot things that are optional or open to change based on your taste preferences. So we say, experiment & taste! The more you get your own flow and begin to be able to identify important tastes in the coffees you try, the better and better you’ll get at pulling espresso at home.

Check back soon for our tips on latte art and steaming milk!