Made by Hand (11 page)

“I know I’m supposed to use thirty pounds of force,” I said, grimacing with effort.

Everything I’d ever read about espresso said that thirty pounds is the magic number for tamping down espresso. One of my friends had even made an espresso tamper with a force gauge on it to show him when he was doing it exactly right.

“It doesn’t matter how much force you use,” Glanville said. “Twenty pounds, forty pounds, eighty pounds. It doesn’t matter.”

In the first five minutes of my lesson with America’s espresso champion, I had learned that my machine was crap and that tamping force didn’t matter. I had no idea what other myths were about to be shattered.

Carrying on, I screwed in the portafilter (the metal part with a handle that holds the ground and tamped coffee), placed a cup under it, and turned on the machine. The pump started up and whined for about ten seconds before anything came out. Finally, jet black drops began dribbling out of the portafilter into the cup. “That one’s gonna be overextracted,” Glanville said. “It shouldn’t come out so slowly.” After forty-five seconds, the cup had about an ounce of coffee in it, and Glanville shut the machine off. He held the cup to his nose.

“Smell it.” He offered it to me, and I took a whiff. “If your coffee smells like burned wheat, then you know that you’re overextracted.” He lifted the cup and slurped a mouthful, spraying the aerosolized espresso over his taste buds. “Too bitter.”

I tried it and had to agree.

“An espresso becomes overextracted when you have too much contact time between the water and the coffee,” he said.

He unscrewed the portafilter and slammed it against the rubberized bar in a knock box (a metal container for holding used coffee grounds), ejecting the puck of spent espresso. He pulled out the filter basket and examined the inside of the portafilter. It was blackened like badly tarnished silver. “Before we make the coffee, we have to take a preliminary step and scrub this little guy out. Coffee oils go rancid when they adhere to the metal and dry like that.”

I’d never cleaned the filter before. “Should I clean it every month or so?”

“We do it once an hour.” Glanville scrubbed it with a small piece of scouring pad until the black stain was gone.

Setting the portafilter aside, he turned his attention to the grinder. “It’s grinding the beans too fine,” he said. “That’s why it was taking so long to extract.”

“Where do you set your grinder at home?” I asked him, since he’d attested to owning the same one.

“Oh, I don’t use mine for espresso,” he said. “For espresso, I would use one of these in here.” He pointed at the massive stainless-steel burr grinders in the lab, which cost more than a thousand dollars each. “Your grinder can’t give you the consistency you need for espresso. But we’ll do the best we can with it.” I knew Glanville wasn’t trying to be snooty. He genuinely wanted to help me, but I had a feeling he grouped people who made espresso at home with DIY brain surgeons.

Glanville set the grind dial back two notches for a rougher grind and turned it on. Instead of the expected high-pitched whine, it made more of a crunching sound. When it was finished, he pulled out the bin and shook it gently from side to side. He explained that this was to neutralize the static charge that causes ground coffee to clump together. He poured the coffee directly into the filter rather than scooping it in, as I had. It rose from the lip of the filter in a mound. A good deal of coffee spilled over the sides onto the counter.

“It’s important to make sure the coffee is distributed evenly in the filter,” he said. “The water will find the path of least resistance through the coffee, and if there are irregularities, it’ll create a channel and won’t touch the rest of the coffee.”

Glanville whacked the portafilter down on the countertop, and the coffee settled, becoming nearly level with the rim of the filter. He then swept his finger along the rim in a practiced circular pattern. The surface was now slightly concave. He pushed down with the tamper once, wiped away some stray particles, tamped again. He then turned the portafilter upside down to let any loose particles fall out. “I do that so they don’t get sucked into the machine when you turn off the pump,” he said.

“Now, the problem with these inexpensive machines is temperature control. The machines we use have proportional-integral-derivative control, or PID, which keeps the temperature variation to within a couple of tenths of a degree. And it turns out that the temperature of the water is one of the biggest factors in the quality of espresso.”

What makes PID so much better than the standard bimetallic thermostat switch found in nearly all lower-end espresso makers? Here’s a common analogy: A bimetallic thermostat is like a car that goes at full speed until it reaches a stop sign. At that instant, the driver slams on the brakes. Of course, the car skids right through the intersection, overshooting its mark. Then the driver puts the car in reverse and backs up at full speed, hitting the brakes when it reaches the stop sign, overshooting in the other direction. Back and forth it goes, never stopping at the stop sign itself.

A PID controller is like a car with a driver who sees the stop sign off in the distance and starts applying the brakes lightly. The closer the car gets to the stop sign, the harder the driver applies the brakes. When it reaches the sign, the car is at a dead stop. Like a smart driver, a PID temperature controller heats water to a specified set point and locks it in.

“Since you don’t have PID,” Glanville continued, “we’re gonna do a trick called ‘temperature surfing’ to keep the water temperature consistent. Before we insert the portafilter with the coffee, we’re going to run a certain amount of water through the group head [that part of an espresso machine that squirts out the hot water]. If the water coming out is hissing, we know it’s coming out at 212 degrees. With the boiling water as our point of reference, we can actually run water through, and once it stops boiling, we can start to count—‘One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, four one-thousand’—and that way we’ll have a point of reference and we’ll have brought the temperature down to usually around 200 degrees, which is much more optimal for brewing espresso.”

Before screwing the portafilter onto my machine, Glanville turned on the pump switch. The water hissed as it poured from the group head. “That’s the sign that it’s at a boil.” After a second or two, the rumbling ceased but water continued to pour out, and Glanville began counting. At “four one-thousand,” he snapped the pump switch off, screwed on the portafilter, flipped the switch back on, and set a cup on the tray, all in one fluid motion. Twin spouts of rich-looking caramel-colored, syrupy espresso poured into the cup.

“That’s about the proper volume of extraction,” he noted. “It looks a little light, so the temperature might have been slightly under. If your coffee looks yellowish, that means your temperature is too low. If it looks really dark, it means your temperature’s too high.”

“So maybe the surfing should be a little bit less next time?” I asked.

“Exactly. So maybe a three count instead of a four count.”

Glanville suggested we try it again with a three count. This time, he used what’s called a “naked” portafilter (also known as a “bottomless” or “crotchless” portafilter). It didn’t have the two spigots through which the coffee is normally channeled. With a naked portafilter you can see the espresso as it emerges directly from the filter basket, making it easy to detect a faulty tamping job. Glanville also used a small glass tumbler instead of a cup, so we could see the color of the coffee.

This time he decreed that the coffee was a step closer to perfection, but he wanted to tweak the grind setting again. He made it a bit finer, then turned on the grinder. He unscrewed the portafilter, knocked out the old puck, wiped the filter basket with his apron, filled it with fresh coffee, and made another shot. This time, he said, it was perfect, or at least as close to perfect as one could get using my machine.

“Of course,” he said, “if you had PID, you wouldn’t have to worry about temperature surfing.”

I packed up my stuff and thanked Glanville for the lesson. As I drove home, I thought about his take on amateur espresso making. He didn’t think that nonprofessionals could make great espresso, especially without professional-grade equipment. I tried to see it from his perspective. He was, after all, the best espresso maker in the country, with a trophy to prove it. He was comparing his expertise to that of rank amateurs like myself. It had been nice of him to humor me in my fool’s errand to make killer espresso. But in the end, I wasn’t discouraged. I wanted to make espresso for my friends and myself. The only barista I would be competing against was myself. Still, Glanville had given me plenty of great advice, and I was excited to apply it.

With his temperature-control advice in mind, I went online to look for espresso machines that came with PID. The few that I found were way out of my budget, like the La Marzocco GB/5 Series Group 4 Automatic Volumetric Dosing Espresso Machine, offered for the sale price of $12,879.99 (reduced from $19,870) or even the Vibiemme Double Domobar for $2,000.

I didn’t want to give up completely on the idea of PID, because temperature surfing didn’t appeal to me, so I looked into the possibility of retrofitting my espresso maker with a PID system. My Web research revealed that my own Rancilio Silvia happened to be the platform of choice for adding a PID system.

There are a lot of reasons to love the Rancilio. It’s got a powerful pump to push water through densely packed, finely ground coffee. It’s made of chromed steel, and the boiler and portafilter are made of heavy marine-grade brass. And, for espresso hackers, the Silvia stands above other machines because it’s easy to modify. In many ways, it’s like a pre-1960 automobile. The electronics are simple, with no microchips, digital readouts, or transistors. The steel cover can be removed with an ordinary Phillips-head screwdriver. And once you take the cover off, you see that there’s plenty of room in there. It’s easy to access all the inner workings of the machine. You can get your hands inside to add and remove components.

The Silvia is what Mister Jalopy would call “maker friendly,” his term for products that can be maintained, repaired, and modified by the owner. He came up with the term (a twist on
user friendly
) after a frustrating experience with his 2000 Chevy pickup. The gas gauge had stopped working. When he took it to the dealer, he was told that the component in the gas tank that sends the fuel-level information to the gauge was faulty and would cost $800 to replace. Mister Jalopy asked the dealer how much it would cost to buy the part so he could install it himself: $500. Why so expensive? he asked. Well, explained the dealer, the fuel sender was connected to the fuel pump, and you had to buy them together as a single part.

That didn’t make any sense to Mister Jalopy. The truck’s fuel pump was fine. Why buy a new one just to get a fuel sender? He didn’t believe that the dealer knew what he was talking about, so he shopped around at a number of auto-parts stores, only to discover that the dealer was right. You had to buy an assembly with both the sender and the pump. He ended up getting one at a discount-parts store for $259. After installing the new assembly (which involved draining and removing the gas tank), he performed an autopsy on the old one.

The fuel sender was connected to the pump by two plastic tabs and a wire connector. He effortlessly removed the fuel sender from the pump with a pair of pliers. Inspecting it, he immediately spotted the problem: A metal tab that connected to a resistor had snapped off. This five-cent part was the root of the problem, but he had just spent $259 to fix it.

Now, Mister Jalopy wasn’t upset that the part had stopped working. That would be silly; a car contains thousands of components that are subjected to all kinds of electrical, chemical, and mechanical stresses. What isn’t acceptable is designing a part that can’t be fixed or replaced by the car’s owner.

Mister Jalopy’s experience led him to dream of a world of manufactured goods that were open to tinkering by the end user. He sat down and wrote a list of qualities a product should possess in order to be considered “maker friendly.” This Maker Bill of Rights was as follows:

Most companies aren’t interested in creating maker-friendly products, but sometimes, apparently by accident, a product comes off the assembly line that way. The Rancilio Silvia is just such a machine. It was introduced in 1997, not as a commercial product but as a thank-you gift to importers and vendors of Rancilio’s expensive restaurant-grade espresso machines. Unsurprising, then, that the machine shares many characteristics of commercial equipment—robustness and repairability being chief among them.