Long Live the Coffee Machine

Since our previous coffee machine died, and we’re now much too classy to go back to being instant-swilling trash (god damn it), we needed another machine. Sabriena found a pretty spectacular deal on a Breville espresso machine thing, and we figured we’d give it a go.

First, in to town to see if any of the local mobs would price match such the amazing deal. Harvey Norman said no, but I didn’t want to give them any money anyway. Betta said they could come down close to it, but not match it… it’d have been about $40AUD more from them, and I’d have considered it if they’d had one in stock, but they’d have to order it anyway, so back home and she ordered it.

We were thinking about going with another “coffee robot”, but my dumb-ass figured that without a complicated mechanical “coffee brew group” there’d be less shit to go wrong. Well, yes and no.

The machine we bought has a bunch of settings: inner grinder burr setting, grind size, grind time, plus all the stuff associated with how long to do it. Plus there’s things like how much force to use tamping the coffee down. I’d used a similar machine at $WORK’s offices in Budapest, so I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar, but either someone had spent a lot of work dialling that machine in or it was just entirely a fluke that I made a drinkable cup of coffee with it… this shit is complicated.

Sabriena did a lot of research, we made many cups of undrinkable coffee, and I did untold damage to my digestive system taste-testing them on an empty stomach. We started to wonder if we’d made a mistake buying this thing. But we finally reached the point where it makes something that actually tastes better than the previous robot did (though I’m suspecting with adjustment to the grind size, it would have done a better job as well).

For future reference, our current settings (with the “coffee culture” beans from Coles, purely because every time we go into Aldi to get their arguably superior beans, they may not have them, and we end up spending way too much on other shit):

Inner Burr: 4
Grind Setting: 9
Grind time: 16, results in about 17~18g of grounds out
Double-shot cup
Double-shot setting
Fill with hot water, add milk+sugar.

There’s doubtless improvements that can be made, most likely with our technique but it may be that the settings are not completely correct yet also.

I’ve definitely got a new appreciation for the skills involved when we order a cup of coffee now. There really is no such thing as unskilled labour.