Keep on experimenting!

I have been blogging about my experience with very light roast of coffee in espresso machine recently and I have said that despite all the attempts I made in changing doses and grind setting, I was not successful in making good espresso.

Well, today I made a break through, I changed the temperature of brewing! Usually, with the Ponte Vecchio Lusso (which is by the way was set at the boiler pressure of 1Bar) I only flush about less than one ouces of water through the group head before comencing on brewing the espresso. Today, instead of flushing only one once,  I flushed quiet a bit more, may be more than two ounces. With a lever machine like the Ponte Vecchio, similar to a heat exchanger, you can regulate the brewing temperature by flushing the group head. In a heat-exchanger machine, you flush to cool off the superheated water in the heat-exchanger plumbing while with a lever machine, you flush to heat up the exposed group head.

I did that and amazingly, the espresso came out super! Ton of creama are present and the espresso was very balance with ton of fruityness. This was in contrary to the sour and thin espresso that I got previously with cooler brewing temperature. So I guess the moral of the lesson is that after you try everything with a certain bean and still not get good result, come back another time and try some more by changing other variables.