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Comment by quijoteuniv | Hacker News Reader

No. The aim of the aeropress is good extraction , not foam/cream. And i doubt you get 9 bars from that thing in the photo. Therefore i suggest an aeropress (and learn about extraction and taste) instead of building a machine without understanding the principle of brewing a shot. For which you need a ceramic grinder by the way. But do not get me wrong, i am all for open source and building things. It might not be about coffee though.

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The builder reuses the pump from a real espresso machine. It might not reach exactly 9 bars, but it's between 7 and 9. I don't know where your skepticism comes from.

Source: I own and repair espresso machines as my hobby and for my daily coffee habit.

What? The way you are responding to qbasic doesn't make sense.

Their point was simply that the high pressure attachment only creates the superficial appearance of crema, not actual espresso.

Indeed I seem to have misread the answer, and have answered poorly. Thanks for pointing that out. My point is that understanding taste, grinding and extraction will take you a long way. One of the keys for extraction is fixing the variables. If you for example have a steel grinder that does not grind evenly(and burns or heat the coffe with friction) the resulting extraction is a result of hazard. You will have both overextracting and underextracting.In the same way not having consistent ( enough) pressure will give poor results. There are ways to compensate but you are going to have «errors» in the taste. I have trained as a barista, trained with scent kits, and have been given enough home coffe brews (supposely espresso) by coffe fans made with home machines that I lost hope in any of those machines. Really experiencing taste while limiting the method is more benefical in my opinion. And kust to be extra clear I am not saying that an aeropress gives you an espresso shot.

Almost nobody is using ceramic burrs. All the top grinders you see in people's homes and most cafes will be using steel burrs.

Your EK43's, Mythos Ones, EG-1s etc have steel burrs.

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