I’ve been making espresso wrong for 5 years
Herein lies a very nerdy coffee-related confession.
5 years ago, I bought a Sage/Breville Barista Express. It was a lockdown present to myself having become obsessed with making better coffee by the wonderful James Hoffmann.
The Barista Express is by no means an “endgame” coffee setup (although it is very lovely), but at the time I needed to save space. A major advantage here is that it comes with a built-in grinder, meaning I only need to have one appliance on my countertop rather than two.
I’ve since spent the last 5 years honing my espresso making workflow. Something I realised very early on was that really smart coffee people seem to unanimously prefer “single-dose” grinder workflows, meaning you only weigh out the exact amount of beans you need, rather than storing all your beans in the hopper of the grinder.
The Barista Express is designed for the latter workflow. Its hopper has space for around a 250g bag’s worth of unground beans, meaning the intention is for you to empty out a bunch of beans and then use the built-in grind timer function to produce roughly repeatable doses of ground coffee for each brew.
But I didn’t want to use it that way. I wanted to weigh the beans going into the machine. And this was my mistake.
See, what I’ve realised this morning is that the Barista Express has a weird design quirk. If you don’t have much coffee in the hopper, it will exhibit “popcorning” behaviour, whereby beans (or chunks of partially-ground beans) bounce out of the grinding mechanism and find themselves lost in the edges of the hopper/grinder area. This means that, if you use the single-dose technique, you are risking losing a pretty sizeable chunk of your dose to popcorning. And I had no idea this was happening.
I was tipped off today while doing a deep-clean of my machine. I opened up the grinder and vacuumed out the beans that had bounced out. I finished the cleaning process and started making coffee again. But something wasn’t right. Suddenly my shots were pulling through much faster. So I opened up the grinder again and realised that it had already filled up with popcorned beans after just 2 shots of espresso.
Essentially, the problem is that I was putting the right amount of coffee in, but not necessarily getting the same coffee out.
This made me realise that using the Barista Express for single-dose grinding is actually hurting my coffee, not helping it. So my new technique involves using the machine as designed: filling the hopper, and measuring the coffee coming out of the grinder rather than the coffee going in.
The lesson: don’t try and outsmart your equipment. Work with it the way it was intended.