In your quest to become the best home baristas you can be, you may commit some common errors that can set you back. Our top recommendations for coffee machines should help your cause, but not as much as avoiding common mistakes that can become a habit when you fail to address them early on. Here are five of them.
Mistakes Home Baristas are Prone to Making
The road to coffee perfection can sometimes be bumpy. Let’s go over the typical mistakes aspiring home baristas tend to make with their machines and how they can solve them.
1. Putting More Coffee Than the Portafilter Can Handle
People tend to rely on intuition for this step, so it’s understandable how many are prone to making it. While it’s not completely bad, it does more harm than good. When you increase the coffee dose, it can clog parts of your coffee maker and seep out in some openings as a black sludge. That’s never a good look.
Also, you are not making your coffee stronger by upping the dose. You are merely over-extracting and, thus, making your coffee taste bitter and hollow. As a result, your coffee starts tasting more like mud than actual coffee.
For strong-tasting coffee, you may want to extract a double shot of the grounds. You can intensify the strength even more by pulling another double shot through the machine and adding those shots to your coffee. Alternatively, you can pour less milk or forego it altogether.
2. Increase Extraction Run Time Due to Fast Pouring
If your coffee pours out too quickly, you only need to grind it more finely to slow it down. Ideally, espresso should pour from the spout like melted chocolate. When it gushes out like water or drips out of the group head, make the grind finer and coarser, respectively. The runtime should also be just right; otherwise, your coffee could come out too watery.
3. Tamping Too Hard or Too Soft
Tamping is vital to brewing coffee to perfection. It’s not linked to runtime, though it does have its effects that can either be bad or good for the resulting coffee. You want to tamp the grounds just enough so that they’re level and evenly extracted. Pushing too much or too lightly may result in the coffee running either too slow or too fast. And, yes, the beans may not end up getting evenly extracted.
4. Not Adding Enough Ground Coffee to the Basket
Like adding too much coffee grounds doesn’t lead to more robust coffee, but a foul-tasting concoction, adding too little makes it a bad-tasting beverage as opposed to a “weaker” drink. If your concern is too-strong coffee, just pull the usual double-shot espresso and don’t add it entirely to your coffee. That means the coffee will still be perfectly extracted despite less of it.
5. Running the “Long Shot” to Brew Black Coffee
When brewing espresso, there is only one ideal way to make it: to pull a double at a ratio of one part coffee to two parts water. When creating a long black, fill a cup with filtered hot water and add the two espresso shots on top. Pulling an extra-long espresso shot will over-extract the coffee, making it extraordinarily bitter and hollow. You should be able to avoid this mishap when you add a perfectly extracted espresso to your hot water. You’ll know you did it right when your coffee is balanced and rounded.
Don’t Let Frustration Get the Better of You
It’s normal to get frustrated trying and failing to brew the perfect cup, but don’t let it get the better of you. Aside from trying to learn something new about coffee, learn from your mistakes too. You can get your coffee inspirations from travel, books, and the internet. Most importantly, you master the basics and move forward from there.
There are times when you’ll feel like everything is working, but there are also moments when you’ll be left to wonder what went wrong. You can feel lost, stuck, frustrated, and ready to turn in the towel.
It’s best to recognize early on that you can’t learn things quickly all the time. Learning how to master the coffee-making process can take time. After all, it’s not merely making coffee; it’s an art. The more you want to achieve, the steeper the path can get.
Don’t let failure dishearten you; let it push you towards achieving more extraordinary things instead. You may be slowing down now, but you’re still moving forward. That’s what matters.
Go Beyond Your Comfort Zone
As a home barista, creating the best-tasting signature coffee requires you to move out of your comfort zone. Today’s machines should make that easier for you. In some state-of-the-art coffee makers, you can mold the different facets of coffee making to your liking. So don’t just stick to what you know and love; try and discover what else is out there in the coffee world to appreciate. It’s in your hands.
