How to make delicious espresso on a budget: A complete guide from beginners to experts

How Beginners Can Brew Better Concentrated Coffee Within Budget

If you're a newbie wanting to try concentrated coffee, as a business, here is our three-year experience. If you're interested, you can jot it down, save it, comment, or share it. We hope it can help you!

In fact, as a business, since we opened our online store, we've discovered that more and more friends have become interested in concentrated coffee. Sometimes, after receiving orders, customers ask us, 'I've never been in contact with specialty coffee or concentrated coffee before. What should I buy or what methods can make my Espresso taste better?'

We initially thought only a few customers would suddenly buy a coffee machine, but recently we found more and more of these customers in the market. Therefore, we want to open a topic to share with everyone. If you want to make a cup of concentrated coffee, what components do you need to buy or where should you invest your resources.

We also want to thank everyone for previously watching our manual coffee brewing guide. We didn't expect so many people to view it.

Does Expensive Equipment Mean Better Concentrated Coffee?

Comparing Manual Coffee Brewing and Concentrated Coffee

Compared to the manual coffee brewing I talked about in the previous article, I believe concentrated coffee is a completely different matter. Besides having good-tasting coffee beans, the tools used can amplify all effects. You get what you pay for is true.

For manual coffee brewing, we can use different methods to adjust the coffee-to-water ratio and brewing methods to make the coffee taste better. Many factors can be adjusted by humans to create flavor, mouthfeel, and smoothness.

In this situation, we don't need to overly rely on machines to easily make a good cup of manual coffee. Therefore, sometimes in a coffee shop, I feel a cup of manual coffee is worth more than a cup of concentrated coffee because much of it is controlled by human experience.

The Key Role of Equipment in Concentrated Coffee Quality

Conversely, I feel concentrated coffee relies more on tools, especially coffee machines, combined with manual tamping methods to find the right grind size to make concentrated coffee taste good. I believe the ratio of human experience to tools should be 30/70.

Firstly, whether the pressure of the coffee machine can be stable, allowing the concentrated coffee to brew stably under pressure and make a good cup of Espresso. Because sometimes certain models can easily tell you they can reach 9 bar, but in reality, it might only be 9 bar for the first 5 seconds, which will affect the extraction process of a cup of Espresso. Finding the right grind size itself is a subject.

Beans from the Same Day, Same Grind Size, Can Also Have an Impact

When you use a large amount of concentrated coffee beans in a coffee shop, you'll find that even if it's the same batch of beans, on different days, due to environmental factors like humidity, the size of the ground coffee may vary. These seemingly insignificant changes can actually have a decisive impact on the flavor of concentrated coffee. Therefore, even using the same grind size, the coffee taste can vary greatly every day.

The Relationship Between Tamping Adjustment and Successful Coffee Extraction

After solving the machine's problems, the importance of tamping methods becomes prominent. This step probably accounts for more than 40% of the quality of concentrated coffee. Tamping ensures the coffee grounds are evenly distributed in the filter cup, which is crucial for the coffee machine to evenly pressurize and extract every coffee ground.

Inconsistent tamping can lead to variations in coffee flavor. For example, you might find the same coffee shop's coffee taste distinctly different on different days. This might be due to different baristas using different techniques and strengths when tamping.

How to Evenly Extract a Cup of Concentrated Coffee

The Importance of a Distribution Needle

In the process of grinding Espresso beans, the fine powder can easily clump. Using a distribution needle can effectively break up these clumps, ensuring evenness during the extraction process.

Choosing the Right Distributor

A general distribution process first uses a distribution needle, then pushes the coffee grounds flat, and finally uses a tamper to compact them. However, we can add more steps to this process:

1. Using a distributor with four angled sides of metal can ensure that the coffee grounds are not compressed to death, but rather evenly flipped into the coffee bowl.
2. Using a gravity distributor can utilize the internal gravity to gently compress the coffee grounds, ensuring that the extraction channel is evenly pressured, making the tamping process more uniform.

Choosing a Tamper with Springback

Common espresso machines often come with a simple tamper, which flattens the coffee grounds by applying force. However, due to different pressure and states applied by each person, this often leads to inconsistent tamping. Using a tamper with springback functionality can ensure consistent pressure every time you tamp. When you feel you can no longer apply pressure, the tamper will automatically spring back, ensuring even tamping.

If budget permits, purchasing an electric tamper can yield even better results.

The Importance of Installing a Water Distribution Screen

After tamping, I will finally install a water distribution screen. This simple device can ensure that water is evenly distributed over the tamped coffee puck, avoiding potential issues of water columns being too concentrated, which can lead to scattered coffee grounds and uneven extraction.

Additionally, during cleaning, the water distribution screen can help keep the main brewing head of the coffee machine cleaner, reducing the use of cleaning tools. After adopting this method, I found that the coffee I make is often very good, and interested friends can try it out.