Scale

I posted a few days back that I got a new scale, the American Weigh 2kg, and I have been loving it thus far as it's vastly superior to the 100 g pocket scale that I had before it.

The biggest plus to this scale is that you can weigh your coffee as you are brewing it. I have actually taken to going to extreme geekiness in my espresso shots by weigh the result liquid gold that I receive out of my machine instead of just relying on my superior skills of guessing the volume of each shot. I found that I have been able to get more consistent result in this method of preperation.

While not really a drawback by being able get fairly consistent results, is that sometime before by just relying on my guess skills there would be times when a shot would come out better than expexted. Probably having a lot to do with some variable in the shot making process changed, so if I had thought that I had pretty much gotten all I could out of a particular espresso I was surprised to learn I was wrong.

It's a pretty dumb drawback that the guessing added to more experimenttation, however it would be hard to re-create that better shot of espresso. It's kind of like the theory that if you put a monkey down in front of a type writer for long enough they would end up writing Shakesphere because at the end of the day it's just a combination of letters arranged on a sheet of paper. At least this way if I decide to experiment more I will be able to recreate that good shot of espresso I had instead of just know the potential of the espresso shot.

I like being able to weigh the shots because even if you are using coffee that is a little too fresh and has a lot of crema to it you are not going to pull less water through the shot because you are doing so by weight. This scale has added a level of consistency that I did not think that a Gaggia Classic was capable of.