It would be really good, when talking about how we are brewing espresso amongst professionals, to start by talking about the weight of the espresso.  We need to stop using volume.  It is useless. Utterly useless.  Saying 1.5oz is like saying “about a basket full of coffee”.  It gets me in the vague ballpark, but it doesn’t really help if I am trying to dial a coffee in.

I’ve been really enjoying the reviews of various blends over on Home Barista, but I’d have really loved to know how much people’s great/amazings shots weighed (especially with Vivace’s Dolce where unusual crema volume is reported) – it would have made the reviews a lot more interesting and transparent.  I am sure it would also have been useful for people following along with those coffees and similar machines at home.

I know Andy Schecter posted about this on Portafilter less than two months ago – and now I just sound like a broken, whining, complaining record.  But weighing espresso is just so useful.

Alright.  That was it, no more posts about it.  This was the last (hopeful!) try.  We shall now return to normal service….

UPDATE: It was in error that I used the Home Barista thread as an example as some of the reviewers were indeed using both mass and brew ratios.  Apologies!

I am not a massive statistics expert – and I am grateful to Vince Fedele for taking the data and cleaning it up and doing some analysis on it.

To start with the easy stuff:

Averages:

An interesting average espresso here – I would have suspected a slightly higher dose amongst readers of the blog, but a good number were dosing at around 14g for a double.  The average shot size was good to see.

Average ground coffee weight:  17.2g
Average shot weight:   32.7g
Average shot time: 27s

This shot would have a brew ratio of 53% – for those unfamiliar with brew ratios (credit to Andy Schecter) – Brew ratios. (Old post)

For those of you out there playing the ExtractMojos for espresso, or have been interested in espresso strength and extraction, Vince did a simple calculation where we assumed that extraction was around 20% of the coffee (as people had dialled in for taste) and therefore the likely strength of the average espresso was 12.2%.

This is very interesting to me because the average is pretty much where I have really been enjoying espresso recently.

Reasons behind recipes

I asked people to state why they used the recipes they did.  Here are the results:

A few surprises for me here:

Not many people use the roaster’s suggested brew recipe.

Flavour was a higher priority than texture.  This is only unusual because we’re talking about brew espresso, whose key pleasure (in my opinion) is texture.

One other reason I wanted people to answer these questions is so I could group them and then analyze.  One big surprise here for me.  I took the top three answers (flavour group, balance group and texture group) and looked at their averages:

Flavour:

Average dose:  17.5g
Average shot weight: 30g
Brew ratio (strength):  66% (13.6% TDS expected)¹

Balance:

Average dose:  18.7g
Average shot weight: 33.4g
Brew ratio (strength):  60% (12.1% TDS expected)

Texture:

Average dose:  16.7g
Average shot weight: 36.9g
Brew ratio (strength):  49% (9.9% TDS expected)

What do the above mean?  First off I was very surprised by the texture group – they pulled the biggest shots, from the least coffee.  Essentially they pulled the weakest shots (from which you’d expect the least texture).  I expected texture focused people to pull shorter shots from more coffee, and yet the results are the opposite.  The flavour group pulled the strongest, thickest shots and the flavour focused people were closer to the average (and how I like my espresso.)

Brew style:

I don’t mind admitting that I will have some preconceptions about how someone will brew espresso based on their starting dose.  Generally I would expect a shorter shot to come from a higher dose.  This has always seemed a little counter intuitive to me, because you have more coffee to extract so surely using less water will only make that more difficult.

I created a simple chart to see if my expectations were correct.  I charted starting dose against brew ratio.  This would mean that if people used more water with more coffee in a linear way then the data would essentially flat line.  This was not the case:

Click to embiggen

As I expected there is an increase in brew ratio (a decrease in relative shot size) with an increased dose.  However you can see the data is all over the place and there is a massive range of shots sizes being pulled from all doses.

From the above graph you can also see the distribution of the doses submitted in the survey.  It may seem strange to see a range from 7g to 24g.  The 7g entries were kept because the shot weight was clearly for a single espresso so didn’t affect the brew ratio calculation.

Summary

There is no right or wrong way to brew espresso.  However, I can’t help but feel this might be one of those moments where the wisdom of crowds has come good.  What I would appreciate is if the average espresso from the group is very different to your own – give it a try!  I’d love to hear your opinions, whether you found anything better from trying to pull a good shot using 17-18g, pulling about 32-34g of water through it (brew on scales) and aim for about 25-28s.  Let me know if you try it!

If I was going to do the survey again I would probably add a few more questions, and I hope to do another survey soon – perhaps about brewed coffee, or maybe espresso again.  Your thoughts welcome.

1. Again – to clarify:  I couldn’t get people to measure the strength of their extracted shots, so it was assumed that if they tasted good they were extracting approx 20% of the ground coffee into the cup.  Essentially this is something of a guess.

Brew recipes have been on my mind again recently, so I thought I’d post up this quick poll.  I’d love if it people could give me some data on this.  If enough people respond then I will post up the results, and any trends that occur.

A few quick things.  Please dial your espresso in to the point that you are happy.  It doesn’t need to be godshot territory, but something you’d serve to a customer or friend who you liked.

Secondly – please weigh things properly.  A lot of people speculate the weight of ground coffee they use, and very few people are accurate with it.  The more accurate the measurement the better.

Just to emphasize this because it is important – I need the weight of your shot not the volume.

Once you’ve weighed the shot feel free to drink it, to make sure it tasted good.

Here’s the poll:

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I am pretty much a 60g/l kind of person when it comes to brewing and, after I was rightly schooled by Kyle Glanville whilst in LA, my grind for the Chemex is pretty coarse. However I just can’t let go of the obsessive chasing of detail. The moment’s where things just come together by mistake are few and far between for me, so I obsess. I tend to use a larger Chemex so when I only want a large cup it bothered me that I didn’t know visually exactly how much water to add, or when I had added enough without guesswork. And guesswork just won’t do. So now I tend to put the chemex or press with the coffee in on a scale, tare it off and then pour the correct weight of water. I dislike transferring water from kettle to measuring jug to brewer so this seems the only sensible way.

It seems so obvious – and whilst no one told me to do it like this surely I am not the only one? Is this too geeky?