For the past few days, I would not say that I have been obsessing over whether or not polish an espresso puck after tamping, but I would say that it has not been far from my mind. I have very realistically been looking at so many aspects to this situation that it may have inhibited my view to see the what the physics of the situation dictate. I am not going to pretend that I didnt find any of our results fascinating in my previous blog post, but I will say that maybe and just maybe what was really happening, is that our tests were not accurate enough to specifically address the question at hand. What I mean is this, keeping all aspects(variables) the same in the situation to be scientific with respect to all sorts of weight tests and differences, as well as time and espressos visual cues we as much as we could have like to can not scientifically enough extract(pun intended) the necessary information to indicate one way or another if indeed polishing does or does not affect shot extraction. (I am sorry if that sentence was insanely incorrectly worded and not properly grammer-ized.) I had the pleasure of talking to Scott Rao tonight on the phone for a few minutes, and after listening and conversing, it came to my attention that whether or not a puck is polished, whether or not you tamp light or hard the major big guy in the situation is how much pressure is coming down onto the puck. Scott said the words "540 pounds" and "pancake" and I got hungry. No, I'm just kidding, but seriously, what he was saying made perfect sense in that even if you were to absolutely scientifically test this and made sure all the variables would not change that without a doubt the results could be that one was somehow different, but overall negligible. The focus should instead be primarily on those variables that do account for some huge changes(ie a tamp level, grind particle size being dialed in correctly and most importantly being in the golden taste zone of what is good. This has although not stopped my curiosity with the subject espresso... the questions and tests must go on!!!!!!
So my personal conclusion... Tamp once, do not bump, do not polish, just do it right the first time...
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I am an ex-amateur-self-taught-barista and I have recently been interested in the same thing. This interest happened after watching numerous tamping videos on Youtube. My discovery was that tapping/bumping should never be done, ever. This step can basically ruin a perfect 1st tamp, but what my question is...
ReplyDeleteis what is the best distribution method and/or do you distribute directly from grinder to portafilter without hand-leveling followed by a semi-tamp to level, then a full ~30lb tamp?
Somewhat huge question, but there seem to be so many ways, is there really a perfect way?
well, i kinda touch on this in my last post about more of the specifics of what we were doing in the process... me personally i would not be so set on doing a leveling before the final (and in my opinion) the only tamp that should be done. A few years back i was a drafter/ auto worker in a shop that made big, very expensive engines and a huge lesson i learned (by getting yelled at and just time saving) is that when you add unnecessary, possibly illogical steps to an already convoluted process such as building engines or designing parts you add a whole other level and series of potential changes and issues to deal with. Specifically in our case with tamping the ideal situation would be to dose directly into the porta-filter, on a timed weight and grind to maintain accuracy in shots... so, unless we all become rich and can bone up for a modified super-jolly grinder or rober i think we can just eliminate so much of the guess work by stripping the process down to its fundamentals...
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