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Comment by ip26 | Hacker News Reader

Espresso is different from other coffee types. There is a tight sweet spot where all the variables are just right, and you get amazing coffee. Espresso equipment is therefore all about making the variables easier to control, because you can’t solve a 12-variable problem if the variables have random values for every iteration.

Lower grade equipment can make great espresso, but maybe you are managing good results only 1/10 instead of 5/10.

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>There is a tight sweet spot where all the variables are just right, and you get amazing coffee.

In double blind trials or audiophile I can hear the gold plating sort of way?

> In double blind trials or audiophile I can hear the gold plating sort of way?

I think this type of comparison with espresso is comparing the differences of far different orders of magnitude. i.e. Impact of a bad grinder, poor bean distribution, or tamping force is orders of magnitude larger than the difference cable connectors makes. The difference in the end result is also (and I'm committing audiophile heresy according to some) far more apparent with espresso.

As someone who brews espresso at home, and is a bit of an audiophile (mostly in the home recording domain), this is spot on. If your grind is too coarse for an espresso, it's very very obvious.

No, it's very obvious. There is some audiophile tendencies at the very expensive end of the espresso home setups, but there's a pretty noticeable difference between a good shot and the same shot ground ever so slightly finer. Because espresso is so strong, any off flavors are very strong and noticeable.

Maybe an analogy here is gold plated wires don't make any difference in a home setup (well, they make zero difference in a digital setup), but when you're AC/DC blowing the roof off an arena with your speakers turned up to 11 bad equipment can be pretty noticeable.

I've avoided the espresso gear habit because I don't think I drink/want to waste enough coffee to have a good shot every time. But several years ago I went to a class where the instructor poured a bunch of slightly different shots of the same coffee ground finer/coarser, extracted longer/shorter, and dosed with more/less grounds/water. The variation in the flavors was surprising. But when she described pouring several shots a day to get the beans dialed in as they use different batches of beans. I decided it didn't make sense at a home scale for me. In a cafe setting is one thing, but in a house of 1.5 coffee drinkers not so much.

A friend doesn't mind, but he roasts his own beans as well. I've had great espresso from him, and I like it but I'm content with little filter

Turbo shots [0] have sort of changed the game here though. Even with the most expensive gear, espresso has typically been inconsistent because the conventional wisdom has been to grind extremely fine and pound high-pressure water over a longer period of time (~30 seconds typically). This often leads to water finding channels through the coffee puck and over/under extraction, except for the rare occasions with perfect prep that you get a perfect extraction, but it's basically unrepeatable.

The new wisdom is grinding coarser, using less coffee, and sending water through at a lower pressure. So instead of an 18g:36g shot dripping out variably in 30 seconds, the aim is something like 15:45g in less than 20 seconds.

[0]: https://strivefortone.com/2020/09/19/low-pressure-turbo-shot...

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