- Today we're gonna talk
about espresso puck prep. We're gonna go through the
techniques and the tools involved in getting your ground coffee ready for optimal brewing
inside an espresso machine. And today we're gonna talk about techniques that
I hope are universal, whether you've got a
cheap espresso machine that you've just started with. Whether you've got a very expensive, high-end espresso machine, everything I talk about today should be applicable to what you do. Now, the goal of espresso puck prep is basically to get that
little puck of coffee ready so that when the water flows through it, it flows through as evenly as possible. That's it, that's the goal. We want it to flow through
at a certain kind of time, we want to control how much
liquid goes through it, but those are kind of outside of the prep piece of this thing. Now, I come from the
professional coffee world, the cafe world, where there
seems to be frighteningly little puck prep in most
places, even good places. They seem to dose the coffee,
maybe settle it a little bit, maybe distribute it, tamp it, brew it, and it's good. And we're gonna do a lot more than that because I think we can
get better espresso. And again, our goals
are kind of different. Cafes wanna make good espresso as quickly and easily
as possible as they can. We wanna make incredible espresso every time we make espresso. What I'm gonna do is go through each of the stages of puck prep and talk through some of
the options that you have and some of the techniques
that people use, the impact that they have, and give you what is ultimately my opinion about how important they are. Is it worth doing? Now, as you'll see in front
of me, there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of stuff
involved in espresso puck prep, and I'm aware that maybe
I have a reputation of spending other people's money
by making them want things. Please, please, please
maximize your current setup before you think about upgrading. You're definitely gonna have
a little bit of FOMO here or a kind of desire
for one more new thing. Try and keep that in check until you're sure it's gonna
solve a problem that you have. To end this video, I'll share
my personal puck prep routine. I'll make a kind of real-time espresso starting from the beans
to ending it with a drink, everything in between, because I don't do every single thing that
I'm gonna talk about today when I make espresso. So first step is kind
of gonna be bean prep, and I'm gonna recommend for many people, especially when they're starting and getting to know their grinder, weighing both the input and
output from the grinder. So you're gonna weigh your coffee beans, and then you're gonna weigh the grounds once they're in the portafilter as well. Not every grinder is a
zero retention grinder or a low retention grinder,
so you wanna make sure that you're getting out
what you're putting in. So for me here, I'm gonna
dose 18 and a half grams in and I'm gonna grind it,
and then I'll weigh it in the portafilter to see how we've done. Now, this is maybe
tangential to puck prep, but it's kind of part
of the whole routine. I'm gonna use what's called
the Ross Droplet Technique. You can either, I think the
first time I started doing this, I would get a teaspoon wet, just run it under a tap
and stir it into the beans. More commonly now, you're
gonna get a little spray bottle and just spray a single spray
over those coffee beans. If you're doing this once or twice a day, I think it's fine to
spray every single dose. If you're making a lot of espresso, you'll find that your weighing
vessel gets a little damp and you don't need to spray. If your manufacturer of your grinder recommends you don't do this, then maybe you just use the
sort of teaspoon method. But for most grinders, a little spray of water on
beans does absolutely no damage. It reduces static and reduces retention, and that makes it a good thing. The last little thing
is before I dose coffee into my portafilter, I'm gonna make sure my
basket is completely dry. I like to use a little
bit of toweling for that. Nice and dry and clean. Dosing into a wet basket can sort of encourage water to flow where water's already been, and you get a kind of additional flow around the edges of the
puck rather than through it, or so goes the theory. Anyway, to grind. (beans rattle) So on the scale, we've got
18 and a half grams out. That's kind of what we wanted, and so we can move into the next phase, which is ultimately the most
important phase of puck prep, and that is distribution. Things are gonna get a
bit more opinionated here, but first I'm gonna talk
about one more tool, which is a dosing funnel. They look like this, and they sit on top of your portafilter. This one, I particularly
like because it has magnets so it sticks really nicely on there so it's just a little bit more reassuring, but it's not by any stretch essential. This is useful in the next phase with different kinds of distribution because it will prevent spillage and mess. Because if we take it off and
look at the basket right now, we've got this mound of
coffee in the middle, and around the edges, we've got some coffee sort of
gaps or troughs, so to speak. If I just compress this
now with my tamper, I will not have an even bed of coffee. The thinner parts of the bed will be much easier for
water to get through, and so more water will
flow through less coffee, and that won't taste great. So what we need to do
is distribute the coffee evenly around the basket. There's a number of ways to do that. Additionally, you'll see that
there's kind of clumps here, where as part of the grinding process, the grounds have almost been
slightly squeezed together, and they will stay as clumps
after they've been tamped and there'll be a more
dense pocket of coffee compared to the pocket around them. Again, they promote uneven extraction. We wanna get rid of the clumps. So, as I said, there's kind of four
approaches to distribution. And that brings us back to tools. This one here is my favorite. It's by a company called Sworkdesign It's a bit more expensive, I confess. You can make these yourself
actually quite cheaply. You can get a cork from a wine bottle and some acupuncture needles, and be on your way to
something very similar to this, or you can buy a kind of finished tool, or there's kind of option's in between. They don't have to be expensive, but I think they are a very good tool. You can get this style, which
has the loops on the end here. These for me, I don't really recommend, I don't particularly like
the looped-ended tools. I prefer a finer needle. In a kind of more commercial sense where you might wanna go a bit faster, you do have things like this. So this was a sort of cheap
thing I think AliExpress. This sits on top of the portafilter, it has a spring inside, (tamper rings) and then you twist it to essentially rake the
needles around in there. This particular one I don't recommend 'cause the needles don't go deep enough. The one I do recommend of this
style is insanely expensive. It's called DUOMO The Eight
and it has less needles, but its build is very nice. This sort of sits on top. You spin it and it does some distribution. It breaks up clumps. It comes on a little stand that cleans it, and if I was trying to do this in a cafe, this would make sense. At home, I'm just not
sure I could recommend you spend this much money. Back to the job in hand. What we're gonna do is
get our needles in there and start deep, start right
at the bottom of the basket and essentially stir and move
around the coffee inside. We're looking to make sure that the coffee's evenly
distributed from the base. Any clumps in the bottom
section are broken up, then work up a little bit higher until you're just sort of
dealing with the top section, and you should have afterwards a very nice, even looking bed of coffee. This for me is sort of prepped and ready to tamp and move on with. Now, I would recommend it. I like it, but there are other ways to distribute coffee before tamping, and so let's talk about the next one, which is wedge distributors. So in the world of wedge distributors, there's a few different styles. I think most people are familiar with the one from Ona
Coffee from Sasa Sestic that was known I think
initially as the OCD, the Ona Coffee Distributor. There's also something
like this from Pullman, which again works in
a similar kind of way. And the idea is that this thing is gonna go and do kind of two jobs. As you move it around, it's gonna smooth the coffee around inside the basket to help distribute it. It's also in that process
gonna apply some pressure to the point that some people recommend just distributing and not tamping. So it goes in and you rotate and you smooth it around, and you end up with what looks very nice. It looks very even, it's quite satisfying, it
feels like it's well tamped. You've done a good job, so to speak. One thing you can do
to sort of compare them is get something like this. This is a 58 millimeter glass jar. Yes, you do a reasonable job of kind of moving coffee around
the top part of the basket, but I think with wedge distributors, they're just not really touching the stuff in the bottom half
or having real impact there, and so for me, I'm just
not a huge fan of them. I don't think they're necessarily
damaging to your espresso, but I just say, I just prefer
needle distribution for me and the style of espresso that I drink. The third style of distribution
we should briefly talk about is one that has pretty
much fallen out of fashion, but is very much how I learned, which is what I would
call manual distribution or just using your hands. When I started in coffee, coffee grinder technology
was pretty poor in some ways and grinders did not produce a fixed dose of coffee for
you every time you wanted one. Instead, you had to use your basket as a kind of volumetric fill. That meant you had to be very consistent in the way that you
distributed your coffee to make sure that you
had an even basket full and why to this day I hate volumetric measurements in cooking. There were really two
major techniques around. If you bought David Schomer's
book when it came out, you'll have seen he kind of did a north, south, east, west distribution, where you kind of push the coffee around with a flat finger like so to try and get it to be all over the bed. If you were into espresso around the, I don't know, early 2000s, you'd have seen what was called the Stockfleth's distribution method that used the sort of
bit of your thumb here, and you would smooth it
around like that on a finish, and then it looked, you know, okay. It's a really easy technique to mess up and be inconsistent with. The last one on the distribution front that I wanna talk about
is vibration distribution, because I think a lot of people are curious if this is a good idea or not. In fact, you can buy a vibration
distributor for espresso. This is the Nurri, and
this is what it's for. Your portafilter would sit in here, and then you run it
(Nurri vibrates) and it would vibrate your bed of coffee. And in theory, you'd
think that would help, that would help sort of
settle it out very evenly. I'll show you how it works. (Nurri vibrates) It's kind of fun and you get
some distribution for sure. It doesn't really break
up clumps in the same way. And the interesting thing about this, and I think this was tested
in "Modernist Cuisine" using sort of ultrasonics as well, is that you seemingly get some
movement of fine particles down to the bottom of the basket. Flow with this is slower than with sort of needle distribution as a kind of comparison point, so it seems to be that you
get a little sandbagging. There's lots of fines that sort of sit at
the bottom of the puck, and that for me isn't a great thing, though it is a fun and interesting
little toy to play with. Now, one other piece of puck prep kit that I think is notable
and kind of interesting is also from Sworkdesign,
who I mentioned earlier. They make the PorcuPress, which is really interesting. This is another collection of
sort of acupuncture needles designed to sit on top of your prepped but not yet tamped bed. And then you're supposed to press it down, rotate it a little bit, press it down, rotate
it a little bit again. and press it down. And in doing so, you have produced an
enormous number of holes across the bed of coffee. Now, the idea is that
when you tamp this now, you'll have kind of seeded pathways for water throughout the puck. It's interesting. It's another expensive tool. There is an impact from it. I think Sprometheus did a good video about this particular thing. I'll leave a link to that down below, but it is just an interesting thing to see people experimenting
with these kind of ideas for what I think are incremental gains, but I'm never gonna be
against incremental gains. So next up is an interesting one, and I would say it's the thing that was the biggest surprise in testing. It was definitely something that kind of caught me
by surprise a little bit, despite the fact that I've
been aware of this now for a good long while, and that is using a little bit of paper at the bottom of your espresso basket. Now this started I think originally with people concerned about the quantities of some of the lipids in
coffee in their espresso. There have been some papers linking consumption of
kind of unfiltered coffee to blood cholesterol and
therefore to heart disease. I'm not saying that's a thing and I don't really wanna
get into that in this video, but that's what started
this whole thing off. Now, a bit of paper
like this at the bottom will filter out any fine
pieces from your coffee, and that means you'll get no flecking, no tiger stripes on top
of your espresso anymore. It will filter out some
of the lipids in coffee, some of the oils, and
that will have a small but noticeable impact on
texture and mouth feel, but it's actually not
as big as you'd think. It does have another
super interesting impact. In testing, it caused
the flow of the espresso to increase quite dramatically. Shots that we're pulling
at say 28, 29 seconds were suddenly pulling at 23 seconds. And in doing so, it also increased their
extraction quite notably. The frustrating thing is
that it's actually quite hard to get a food safe bit of paper that fits the bottom of the basket. Some people have been
using scientific papers. They are not rated as kind of food safe. I don't think there's a huge risk there, but you should be aware of the risks of kind of non-food safe papers. Here I'm using a Pullman basket because it fits a
hole-punched Chemex paper. So you can buy hole punches
of two and a quarter inches very easily on the internet. I'll leave a link down below, and then you can just
punch out from something like a Chemex filter paper a
bunch of these little things and they fit some baskets very well. Some people like to wet
the paper before they dose, just to make sure that
there's no kind of impact of the WDT or the needle
distribution at that point. I haven't seen any inconsistency or issues with the dry paper. Obviously you don't wanna get the sides of the basket too damp. You wanna keep those nice and dry, but yeah, the bottom can
be a little bit damp. That's okay. (espresso machine buzzes) Now, as you can see, it has
no negative impact on crema. There's plenty of the
good foamy stuff on top if that's what you like. That's a tasty, clean, balanced espresso. I sort of hate the fact
that I feel this way. It's more work, it's more
effort, it's a bit more waste, but I like what a paper filter at the bottom of an espresso
basket does to the shot, to the extraction, to the whole process. I don't think it's essential, but I do think it's
worth experimenting with, though I wish there was just an easier way to get filter papers for these things that fit espresso baskets
and that fit say VST baskets, because VST baskets are a different size. You'll see the Aeropress
is that little bit bigger, so it absolutely will
not fit inside a basket. And some people have been doing a kind of sandwich of these things, so one at the bottom
and also one at the top, though that has become less common with the advent of the
next thing to talk about, which are puck screens. These are puck screens. These are sort of thick
discs of metal mesh designed to sit exactly
on top of your puck, edge to edge inside your basket, and do a couple of things. Firstly, they should act as an additional water distribution aid. They should help the water
coming from the shower screen spread more evenly over
the puck of coffee. Secondly, the theory is that they prevent sort of excessive expansion of
the puck during pre-infusion, which helps create a more
even extraction afterwards. Do they work? Well, in testing, I think they do, yes. I saw an increase in
extraction when using these. It wasn't an enormous increase, but it was consistent and it was consistent
across different brands, which was good to know. They are, however, frustrating
and fussy things to use. They're irritating and difficult to clean. Some people have resorted to
ultrasonic cleaning baths. Steaming them with some Cafiza
or espresso machine cleaner isn't a bad option either, but they are a little bit of faff, and so whether they are
worth it, so to speak, in terms of the cost of buying one, the sort of pain of
using one really depends how obsessed you are with squeezing every last single drop out
of the coffee that you have. All of this leads us to the last stage of espresso puck prep, which is tamping. Now, obviously you'll tamp and
then put on say a puck screen if you're gonna do that, but I figured this was
kind of a nice last step to talk about. If you wanna use a traditional tamper, then the ergonomics are important in terms of looking after your body. You wanna hold it kind of like a doorknob, thumb pointing down the whole tamper. And when you tamp, you wanna have your elbow
right above the coffee, as if you're about to
sort of screw in a screw that might be sticking
out of the wood surface. You've got a screwdriver in your hand and you would get right over it so you could drive down
and apply pressure. Now here, you don't need to twist. You're just looking to press
down as evenly as possible until the coffee stops feeling squishy. That's it, and you're
trying to press as much air out of the coffee as you can to make sure that the bed is even, there's no air pockets left behind. I like to rotate the tamper very slightly so that with my fingertips I
can feel if I'm level or not. If I'm not level, I'll feel
it as my fingers rotate. Twisting, polishing, that kinda stuff, I learned to do it and no
one knows why we did it. We've mostly stopped doing it. It feels nice. It feels a little bit flashy. It does nothing for your
coffee, so don't worry about it. That's a traditional tamp. On the tamping front, there
are obviously other options. You can use a wedge distributor. You do have things like this,
which is the Force Tamper, which is a very expensive
solution to a problem. Now, when it comes to tamping pressure, it's kind of a binary thing. You've either pushed hard enough to get rid of the air
pockets or you haven't. Pushing harder than hard enough makes no difference to extraction or flow rate or anything like that, so it's not a a complexity of
the espresso brewing process or of puck prep, but something like this
will sort of stop pressing at a certain pressure. You'll hear a kind of click (tamper clicks)
like that, where you've crossed a
threshold of pressure and you've definitely pressed hard enough and it won't press any harder. Additionally, the sort of design of this means that it sits on
the rim of the basket and it should tamp
perfectly level every time. These are expensive. They're very nice and they
definitely take away a variable that some people worry about, and they sort of strip some
of the pleasure of espresso. So for some, it is a good
worthwhile investment. For others, it doesn't really make a good return on their investment. If they're comfortable,
safe, and consistent in their manual tamping, then they may enjoy using
one of these things. And there a lot of
beautiful tampers out there. I made a video about that once. Now I'm aware we've gotten to this point and we've covered a lot of ground. And in doing it this kind of way, I feel like I've thrown a
lot of information at you, which is why at the end of this thing, I kind of want to just go
through a real-time puck prep so you can see what it looks
like and decide for yourself, is this seemingly too much
faff or is it too much work, or actually, is it pretty simple and easy and probably worth the
time and effort involved? But before we do that, we do need to have a quick
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description down below. Thank you to Surfshark
for sponsoring this video. Now let's make some espresso. (beans tinkle) (bottle spritzes) (beans rattle) (beans clatter) (machine buzzes) (funnel magnet pings) (needle distributor stirs) (basket taps) (tamper clicks) (Cup and scales put in place) (machine buzzes) (espresso drips) (machine clicks) (spoon stirs) (spoon taps) (James slurps) One last thing before we close out: This t-shirt, that print over there, is the Coffee is an Act of Kindness design that we've had actually
for a little while now, and we've just launched it now. All proceeds, all profits
from the t-shirt and the print will go to four different charities all operating and helping with the crisis, with the war in Ukraine being, I think, grotesquely
waged by Russia. It's horrifying to see and so we wanna support it in some way, so these are now available. The t-shirts are limited run. The poster will be around
for a little while, as well. If you like it, click the link down the description below. But now I wanna turn the
questions, of course, over to you. Tell me about your puck prep. Tell me what you've changed recently. What has made a big impact to the espresso that you drink every day? Does this all seem too
much, not worth the effort, a sign of obsession? Let me know down in the comments below, but for now, I'll say thank
you so much for watching and I hope you have a great day.
