G'day bud! Congrats on the purchase! Am excited for ya 🙂. I'm not too familiar with how those particular machines work and are set up, but we can try help in whatever way we can. Most machines and grinders are relatively similar in functionality. Awesome stuff making sure it's clean, super important! It's definitely recommended you use good quality, freshly roasted beans. Freshly roasted beans is so so so important, not only tastewise, but it improves your learning dramatically, as you'll have much more stable parameters to work with. As long as the Niccolo beans are fairly freshly roasted (which if they're the ones that come in that the staff use I'm sure they would be). It depends on the beans, but alot of beans start to noticeably decline in quality and stale after 4 weeks or so of being roasted. Not sure of the quality of the beans but definitely give them a go. With the grinder when dialing in for the first time, a lot of people recommend starting off too fine (even to the point of the machine choking up a bit trying to extract a shot), and then go slightly coarser and coarser from there to get the right flow. Easy to make slight adjustments coarser with subsequent shots to watch how it affects the shot volume. So I'd start with the fine setting, and if its far too slow a flow, change it to a slight bit coarser, pull a few shots, evaluate, and go from there. Most important factor is taste, so definitely taste everything, even the really crappy shots haha as it helps the learning experience and in knowing what you like and don't like in a drink (as well as developing your coffee evaluating if you wanna get seriously into it like a lot of us 😛). Make only very gradual adjustments, and only change one thing at a time in trying to change a shot. Many (including myself!) change too many variables all at once and then won't know what affected what. So best to make small changes. So I'm not sure what size filter basket you have, but fill it enough with grounds so that it's fairly full and doesn't scrape the coffee as you lock it in. You can test this with the 5 cent test: putting a 5 cent coin on top of the tamped coffee, lock it in, but don't pull the shot, take it back out. If the 5 cent coin has made only a slight imprint in the coffee that's probably ideal. If none, maybe increase the dose a little bit. If it's buried in the coffee you've dosed too much. Aim at the start to achieve a 1:2 ratio of dry coffee in to liquid coffee out. So if you've dosed 16 grams in your basket, aim for about 32 grams in the liquid espresso shot, and this to extract within about 25-30 seconds. Once you've gotten this then you can tweak things a bit, slow it down a bit etc to see what suits your tastes, but I'd recommend starting with this (using scales to weigh things is ideal rather than going by volume like 30ml, but play around and see how it goes). In terms of tamping, you generally want your elbow in a straight line above the tamper, with your arm bent in an upside-down backward L shape hehe. Just so you tamp straight, the force goes straight down and you have a nice level puck. Definitely worth watching some YouTube videos on how to tamp. There's a few different ways, but as long as you're consistent and it's a level, even coffee puck. Also tamp firmly until you can't push anymore. You don't need to absolutely push as hard as you can, just tamp downwards until there's no more resistance from the coffee, and this is a good consistent method. The machine I'm not sure how it's setup, but I would just have standard factory settings, wouldn't worry about water pressure etc. If you can manually start and stop a shot that's better, as you can choose when the shot is done rather than the machine doing it. Oh yeah and stopping a shot once the stream of coffee has paled and thinned out quite a bit (optimally within that 25-30 second bracket for now). That post went on for awhile sorry haha! It will definitely be trial and error, but it's the most exciting time this learning stage! Let us know how you go 🙂
