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Finally got a great brew...

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  • Shs
    replied
    Re: Finally got a great brew...

    Good onya mate. Yes Ive seen some brilliant coffees made using some very average machines, and Ive seen some rubbish coffee made with brilliant machines.

    Get the technique right, and youll be a professional before you know it.

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  • norm_p
    started a topic Finally got a great brew...

    Finally got a great brew...

    Hi all. My first post - I have finally got a great brew. Its a long story. I have had a Gaggia Classic for about 5 years, got it second-hand, and I have never been able to get a decent espresso out of it. I have adjusted the OPV many times and never gotten anything slower than 8-9 seconds.  It also had steam production issues. I had put it aside thinking it was maybe time to either give up or buy a new machine that worked. A nice guy I work with got talking about coffee with me and he enthused me enough to try again. I had a Gaggia Baby with a cracked shell sitting idle so I wondered if I might be able to scavenge any parts. Lo and behold when I pulled out both boilers, the Classics was heavily corroded, but the Babys was just about perfect. Ditto for the group head. They looked the same after I removed the steam pipes, so I have swapped them over, and again set the OPV (thanks to this site). Hmm, first efforts - 9 seconds again, no matter how hard I tamped it. In desperation, the work guy counseled me that I really needed a grinder to sort things out properly - I had been relying on Illy tins and some supermarket grinds up to this point. I bit the bullet and sourced a Sunbeam EMO450 at the right price, set it to 10 and it just about choked the Classic - success at last! I wound it back to 15 and using some coffee from a great Canberra roaster (Lonsdale Street, thanks again Nick!) made a just about perfect (for me at least) espresso, thick crema and a nice pour in 30 seconds with just a light tamp. Unbelievable, I had thought the Gaggia was past it, but not so. Moral of the story - this just again re-iterates the advice I have read over and over - its not the machine, its all in the quality of the coffee and the grind...
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