Any baristas (coffee enthusiasts) among us? :-)

Gaggia classic here :)
 
boliston said:
I have got a fully manual grinder - a "porlex tall" which only cost about 38 pounds - it's a bit labour intensive
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You know you can automate those, right?

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Just bought a new coffee machine on ebay :)
 
Niiiiice! :)
 
Got a Gaggia classic as well as Areopress, V60, Hario drip and a Clever dripper. Thinking of selling the Gaggia though. Hardly gets used.
 
I'm not a connoisseur or anything but I do enjoy a good coffee. Since I've found out I'm lactose intolerant I've been enjoying much more black coffee and I think the tastes are definitely more defined than when you have milk with it. We normally get the different ones from M&S at work for a pick up first thing in the morning and there's some really good ones from there. They come with the taste notes like wines and I always struggled to see the difference, take the milk away and voila! That isn't to say I don't drink it with soy milk from time to time too though! It's surprisingly excellent actually, nice and creamy, the only downside is that if you put it in a brew fresh from the kettle it will curdle so needs to cool a little first :)

My all time favourite is some beans we get from a deli not far from the office, it's just labelled Peaberry. Whether there are different kinds I don't know but the one they have is sublime! I believe it's from Kenya :)
 
Gaggia Classic machine and a Dualit Electric grinder...

I get a Colombian Breakfast bean from whittards, goes down well. on a medium grind, gets lots of crema and good quality taste, with little or no after bitterness. Not used it for a while, I need to do the Classic mod with the plastic steamer nozzle...
 
I had an ESAM4200 for about 3 years before it broke down.

Worked perfectlt and one day it just broke despite being looked after with monthly descaling and cleaning.

Now moved onto a Sage Duo Temp Pro.

Not B2C but makes better coffee and there is something about the Barista feeling of a more manual machine.
 
Anyone know of a grinder that'll take beans right down to really fine powder for Greek/Turkish coffee? Ideally reasonably inexpensive!
 
Eureka Mignon or used Mazzer Super Jolly would probably do that
 
@Nod , ebay have a range of traditional-style Greek/Turkish grinders ranging from around £3 to £30.
 
Tori_T said:
@Nod , ebay have a range of traditional-style Greek/Turkish grinders ranging from around £3 to £30.
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if you're looking for something other than a "keep fit" grinder, one of the cheapest I can think of that'll go right down to a powder would be the Gaggia MDF Burr Grinder - they crop up on fleabay and can go for under £100 if you're lucky - rock solid grinding mechanism, the doser is a bit fragile (lever comes adrift if you give it too much "thwack,thwack,thwack" pretending to be the tool behind the counter in Starbucks) but otherwise they're excellent - had one before I traded up for the matching Rancilio Rocky for my Epoca2... Bought it on ebay for £80, ran it for 2 years and sold it for £95... Try and get the black one rather than the cream finished one, as it's easier to keep looking clean ;)

here's a link to one that just finished... think they're about £180 new - fair bit less than the price of a Rocky which would DEFINITELY do the job - but at £240 or so... I only really bought the Rocky because I was being a bit of a tart!
 
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TheBigYin said:
....... I only really bought the Rocky because I was being a bit of a tart!
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:ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO:
Coffee to screen interface!!
You owe me a new phone. :p
 
Tori_T said:
@Nod , ebay have a range of traditional-style Greek/Turkish grinders ranging from around £3 to £30.
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Cheers for that, Tori - we have a couple of those that we now use as pepper grinders. While they do get it fine enough, it's bloody hard work getting more than a teaspoon out of them (at powder fineness)!

I looked for a decent budget one in Crete but nobody seems to grind their own these days - every village has at least one coffee shop that sells fresh ground as well as brewed so there's no real need to do it yourself unless you're a masochist with one of the "keep fit" ones. It's cheap as well, marginally more expensive than unground but not so much as to make DIY an attractive option. Much as we both love Greek coffee, it's a bit of a PITA even if you have it ready ground. IF there was an easy and cheap grinder available, we might drink more of it but the Tassimo machine is so quick and easy that we tend to go to that rather than a briki on the stove. Shame you can't get Greek coffee Tassipods!

Mark, when you're next feeling like a tart, I may well be interested in your old Rocky - at a significant discount from new! Stick it in the classifieds section here... :whistle: !!! :p
 
Just spent a couple of hours faffing with Coffee making kit... a friend decided to get himself an espresso machine, something that he could control and tweak... asked my advice while down the pub and off the top of my head told him to keep an eye on ebay for a decent used Gaggia Classic and a Burr Grinder... Last night he rang me and said "I've just had a Gaggia Classic and a Cuisinart Burr Grinder arrive from ebay a couple of days ago, and I'm at my wits end - can't get a decent drink out of the buggers - thinking I aught to have just got a Nespresso and saved the faff". So, I offered to come over and have a look at what he was doing.

Well - first problem was the grinder. It's okay, a bit "fast running" motor-wise - but even though it was a flat-burr grinder, it simply wouldn't adjust down much past a "drip coffee" grind. 5 minutes of googling though had the answer... http://www.instructables.com/id/Hacking-the-Cuisinart-SupremeGrind-for-Espresso/

And, then, looking at the actual Gaggia, he'd bought one of the post-2015 machines - I only realised when I asked him where the silver pipe was that's normally in front of the water tank... He said "there isn't one"... At which point I decided to open the lid and have a look - yep - it's the stainless steel boiler one - i.e. the dumbed down one with the power saving gubbins etc... While I'm thinking about that he hands me a replacement steam wand (the Rancilio one) and says "I was going to fit one of these as well - everyone says that the original one is crap... but I can't see how it bolts in..."

At this point I sort of reconciled myself to a bit of workshop time. Piled all his kit into the car, and took it home with me. I've spent most of the afternoon faffing - the Grinder was a simple fix...

It's now grinding pretty much perfectly (as much as a high-speed mill CAN at least) - it's producing spot-on espresso grind from my current decaf. beans on #3 for their machine (so there's 2 finer settings available - #1 is pretty much "turkish ibrik" - in fact I think it's finer than my "rocky" goes, #2 works better in my machine as it's a semi-commercial kit and has a bit more "oomph", and #4 and #5 I'd say would be good for oilier beans and the "full-caff" beans. then there's #6-#10 which range from Moka-Pots through to an Aeropress, #11's spot on with a cafetiere (french press) and #12-15 makes assorted sized rubble that will be fine in filter machines...

I've made (and tasted, then thrown out) about a dozen cups of coffee so far - think I've had a "nett three espressos" worth - but as I've been working with a bag of (relatively cheap, commercial cafe type) decaf. beans I'm not buzzing in the slightest...

Amazing the difference that a bit of fine tuning can make to a coffee-grinder. All told it took 10 layers of Self Adhesive Aluminium tape fastened to the back of the grinding burr as a "shim" to tighten the tolerance up to an acceptable degree... I'm pretty sure that it's all down to manufacturing tolerances, and wear on the tooling parts as they go through production runs - plus the manufacturer erring on the side of caution in not getting the burrs "too tight" so that they clash.

I simply cleaned the machine thoroughly, then set it to it's finest setting, and used a set of "feeler gauges" - the things you use to set spark plug gaps - to see what the gap was between the two burrs. Tape was labelled 40micron tape, and my gap was 0.47mm... so, 12 layers would be too thick (0.48mm, 11 (0.44mm) layers would have been pushing my luck allowing for tolerances in the tape and adhesive, not to mention getting it stuck down flat 10 times... 10 Layers it was then! Stick it on, trim the edges and the central hole, drill through the attachment holes and remove any burrs on the tape, then screw it all back together. And it worked pretty much spot on first time. Classic case of measure 47 times, cut once...

Meanwhile, his machine was basically steeping in descaling solution (you don't know what the machine's been left like when you buy second hand - removed the shower screen and gave the head a good old cleanup - sadly, with the 2015 you can't backflush, so it was another "soak the bits" job to clean up the head components... All clean, re-assembled and I screwed a preddure gauge onto the portafilter to check pressure - came out at 9.5bar static, so should be pretty close to spot on at "brewing" pressure.

Finally, let it all cool off, and opened the lid to see about the steam wand... basically, it was pretty much the same as the installation in a Baby Twin, that I found on Youtube...

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5laAiLnxT0


took less than 30 minutes, 20 of which was swearing at the old wand whilst working out how to thread it through all the other pipework and wiring, then re-threading the slightly longer and more awkward Rancilio one back through the same gap.

It's all working now, buttoned up and leak-free - steaming like a good un, and I'm sat back enjoying a rather nice double espresso shot for my trouble, before my mate calls in on his way from work for a quick masterclass and to collect the damned things.

Only thing I haven't been able to fix for him is the machine is in need of a new head gasket pretty soon, because to get a good seal, the portafilter handle has to be a little over "perpendicular" to the machine - i.e. slightly overtightened. I'll get him to order on, and keep it in stock waiting for when the current one finally goes...

there'd better be a drink in this for me, and I'm not talking coffee...



 
incidentally @Nod - the modification to the grinder above would work brilliantly for your Greek/Turkish coffee habit - and if you can unscrew 3 screws, stick tape down flat, and have a responsible adult nearby to wield a scalpel to cut the requisite holes in the tape, it's a cheap and easy fix on a £30 fleabay purchase...
 
As it happens, I've just discovered that one of Mrs Nod's teachers' husband runs a Greek food delivery bus and has spent a LOT of time sourcing a local supply of fine ground for his van so I should have a local source when we next get a Greek coffee kick!

Cheeky sod! I am a reasonably responsible adult and am perfectly capable of removing 3 screws, sticking tape down flat (I even have a roll of Navy/Fleet Air Arm battle damage tape [Al, self adhesive, stickin' over bullet holes for the purpose of]!) and a scalpel (OK, X-Acto knife but should be good enough for the job.) Good job it doesn't require a grown up though!!! :p Finding the 3 screws to replace them could prove the difficult bit.

One possible fly in the ointment is that I don't "do" e-bay so sourcing a cheap Cuisinart grinder might prove harder. Clicking through the green link (to John Lewis) that the forum has added to your post, I see a couple of cheaper options to the Cuisinart machine - might they do the job or would I be better splurging on the Cuisinart one the link takes you straight to?
 
Can some of the more learned members please explain why you can't just chuck coffee beans in a high powered blender and set it to "obliterate" level? I'm sure this wouldn't satisfy connoisseurs but I'd love to know why not.
 
It's all about the 'evenness' of the ground product... A blade blender, or blade grinders for that matter, just smash the beans up, leaving bits from a couple of mm cubed, to a few microns of dust. A burr grinder tents to produce a more even quality of particle size, whatever the size it's been set to.

Plus, the slower the burr grinder turns, the less chanc that the bean will shatter, releasing dust, it'll tend to slowly crush the bean to the set size... And, if it's going slower, it doesn't get as hot, so won't waste or burn off as many of the aromatic oils that make the coffee special.
 
TheBigYin said:
It's all about the 'evenness' of the ground product... A blade blender, or blade grinders for that matter, just smash the beans up, leaving bits from a couple of mm cubed, to a few microns of dust. A burr grinder tents to produce a more even quality of particle size, whatever the size it's been set to.

Plus, the slower the burr grinder turns, the less chanc that the bean will shatter, releasing dust, it'll tend to slowly crush the bean to the set size... And, if it's going slower, it doesn't get as hot, so won't waste or burn off as many of the aromatic oils that make the coffee special.
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Perfect. Thank you.

And there was me thinking it was money ;)
 
TheBigYin said:
It's all about the 'evenness' of the ground product... A blade blender, or blade grinders for that matter, just smash the beans up, leaving bits from a couple of mm cubed, to a few microns of dust. A burr grinder tents to produce a more even quality of particle size, whatever the size it's been set to.

Plus, the slower the burr grinder turns, the less chanc that the bean will shatter, releasing dust, it'll tend to slowly crush the bean to the set size... And, if it's going slower, it doesn't get as hot, so won't waste or burn off as many of the aromatic oils that make the coffee special.
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There's a coffee shop in Chania (and probably similar in almost every Greek town!) where they grind the coffee down to near dust - but slowly. The powder's still quite warm when they bag it up and the smell in the shop would give you (Mark) palpitations and other signs of excitement! The queue is often out of the door and there's a fairly constant stream of moped delivery men taking bags to assorted restaurants around the city.
 
Another Aeropress fan here!! Saturday and Sunday mornings are not complete without a fresh pressed coffee.
 
Have a nespresso machine with the milk frother thing, we got it free technically as we used vouchers we received as moving in gifts.
Who knew moving in gifts was a thing?

Only downside is having to go to the Nespresso shop for the pods or order online in bulk.

My partners parents have a 'proper' one which grinds the beans.
It sounds like its about to take off and personally, I can't taste the difference between ours and this.
Plus it takes up 3x as much room as ours.
 
Anyone use Monmouth Coffee from Borough Market / Covent Garden? Really like their Indonesian blend.
 
Also, anyone know where I can get East Timorese coffee? I worked there back 2010/11 and really enjoyed the coffee but can't find it here easily.
 
Quoth said:
Anyone use Monmouth Coffee from Borough Market / Covent Garden? Really like their Indonesian blend.
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Nope - but every time I'm in St Pancras I get coffee from Sourced where they use Monmouth. Probably because I need coffee after the £4 a minute train ride from Kent but it always tastes really good.
 
Quoth said:
Also, anyone know where I can get East Timorese coffee? I worked there back 2010/11 and really enjoyed the coffee but can't find it here easily.
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Starbucks. Well, not Starbucks shops but supermarkets etc which sell Starbucks coffee. Unfortunately it seems to be a US-only product. It's available from Amazon US but not Amazon UK. But still, I imagine it might be easier to find someone who can bring you back some from a trip to the US than to find someone who can bring you back some from a trip to East Timor.

Amazon
Walmart
Target also ship to the UK

There might be importers on eBay and such like.
 
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