Understanding Espresso - Dose (Episode #1)

[Music] welcome to a series within a series let me explain I've been doing some videos about how I dial in espresso my patreon back is pick a coffee you pick a machine pick a grinder and I dial a coffee and talk my way through the process I've done three of these videos and I've been grateful for a lot of feedback and comments on one unifying theme has been that I'm not really doing enough to explain why I'm making a particular decision why I'm adjusting something at that point so I thought I'd do this this is the first of four parts covering one variable at a time in a bit more depth a bit more detail about how I think about that variable that should make a little bit more sense when we go back to darling in a bunch of a random different coffees from all over the world this first episode is on DOS on the amount of coffee that you put in the portafilter the amount of ground coffee that you start with well also in the future talk about ratio how much water you push through that coffee grind size when to go finer when to go coarser wenter we'll leave it alone and brew temperature we're not going to talk about time as a variable time is how we're going to track the changes to our variable it's one of the two things that we measure when we're brewing espresso right we're gonna achieve a recipe see how long it takes and then most importantly see how it tastes that's the whole point of this whole thing anyway that's what we're gonna cover I'm gonna talk to you in a bit of depth about how I think about dose setting the dose why it matters when to change it and when to leave it alone now in order to do this effectively I need to cover briefly extraction theory rather than the key idea behind what we're doing when we're brewing coffee is we're extracting soluble material from the ground coffee the more of this we extract the better to a point this kind of a lopsided bell curve right the more you extract it gets better and better and better and better and better and then it suddenly kind of falls off a cliff at one point and tastes pretty terrible again we tend to talk about these as percentages because all let's say 18 grams that you put in a basket well a percentage of that ground coffee is dissolved in the cup down below if you wanted to you could knock that puck out dry it out in an oven and weigh it again and you'd find out how much stuff was in the cup that you drank earlier like the day before we don't have to do that that's just how it worked for a long time until refractometers happened and then the world got easier and more complicated that isn't the point the point is that extraction getting soluble material out and into the cup below is work to increase your extraction you have to work harder and that's really important when you're thinking about dos because the more ground coffee that you start with the more work you're going to have to do to properly extract 18 grams requires 20% more work in a way than properly extracting 15 grams that's something we need to bear in mind because a few things will influence well how much work we can do and how much work we should do generally speaking the quality of our coffee equipment will determine how easy it is to do a lot of work a better coffee grinder grinds more uniformly it does a better job it's easier to extract larger doses of coffee it's easier to do more work with a better grinder similarly higher quality espresso machines generally have better componentry better quality more even there's been a water dispersion but a water temperature just they're kind of better at doing the work that's the subtext here but machine aside there's one more thing that we need to think about when we're deciding what dose to work with it may seem like a detail but actually the basket that you're working with that metal basket that holds the coffee well that determines more than anything else the correct dose that you should be using many modern baskets now come with a DOS reference on them the rough kind of guide so how much coffee you should use VST baskets for instance might come as a 19 gram basket a 20 gram basket and give or take one gram that's probably what that basket should be using and generally speaking that is an upper limit there isn't a low limit in terms of quality it's perfectly okay to brew 14 grams of coffee in an 18-grand basket but just know that the downside of that will be that it will be very messy the size of the basket the height of it if you will mean that if you use a much lower dose there's a little bit of space between the top of the cake and the shower screen where the water came from and at the end of the shot when all of that pressure that you built up dissipates rapidly up through the group head that way you tend to see a little explosion of a coffee puck you'll get a soupy messy destroyed puck it tells you nothing about what happened in the extraction it's just very irritating to clean up it's messy and I don't like it I like to just knock out a clean puck and do the least amount of work possible when it comes to cleaning while still having good tasting espresso so the basket is important if you don't know Google is your friend if you've got an old-school classic Italian espresso machine probably start at 14 or 15 grams they're really just not built for these much higher doses that people like and while higher doses have certainly become popular it doesn't mean then they're better there's nothing better about brewing with a higher dose that tradition of higher doses came from people manually filling baskets in order to get a consistent dose when grinding to order when grinders weren't designed to grant order now grinders are absolutely designed to grind to order so we can use whatever dose we want and there's no more messing around and doing the dosing on the basket with all of the nonsense then there is another important variable in all this which is the coffee itself now I'd love to say this hard and fast rules and I guess there's one or two generally speaking the darker the roast of a coffee the the less work you need to do to extract it the easier it is to get those syllables out so it's it's generally okay to use a higher dose with a darker roast coffee with a lighter roast coffee you've got to work really hard to extract it and that means if you start with a big dose you've just got too much work to do you've got an impossible amount of work to do you're always going to have a sour harsh under extracted week thin bodied sadness and you don't want that no one wants that so I would recommend with lighter roasts go for a lower dose your taste buds will thank you the old rule of thumb for a long time was that density was the key right and the high density coffees coffees grown a high elevation washed coffees typically well they were harder to extract it's a it's a double rule of thumb generally speaking lager and coffees are easier to extract than higher grown coffees but it's not an absolute now we move into the all-important decision-making which is we've started darling in our process what should we do and as much as possible really you want to keep your dose a constant you start with what is quote-unquote the right dose for your setup you haven't gotten too ambitious with the amount of work that you're gonna do and you would keep it absolutely the same and I would recommend doing that as much as possible it's pretty much the last variable I will change but there are certain situations where I'd recommend just tweaking the dose slightly now at home you might have a grinder that when you adjust the grind setting you need to grind through a little bit of coffee because it retains a bit of ground coffee that was the old grind setting so to speak so you gotta grind through 5 10 sometimes 20 grams of coffee to get your new grind setting to come through if you've got 250 grams of a coffee and you're dialed in and you're pretty close but not quite there right you pulled a shot you put 18 in you've got 36 out in like 25 seconds and it tasted nearly good looks like it was like okay but needed a little tweak but you have got much coffee left it's precious you're limited I wouldn't change my grind I wouldn't do that I would just increase my dose half a gram and use that extra coffee to help slow the flow through the cake obviously the more ground coffee that you have the more resistance that cake will provide the harder it is for the water to get through and the longer the contact time will be to get to your desired ratio and in this case it may push your shot from a 25 second shot to a 28 29 second shot and that's small increase in contact time you're gonna keep your ratio the same so you gonna brew a little bit more liquid through that may just around the shot out that may just take you to a place that is delicious with the least possible waste now the opposite situation may be true you might have pulled a shot that was maybe like 32 seconds you didn't really love it well you could yes reduce your dose a little bit that shot will flow quicker but bear in mind by reducing your dose you've given yourself a little bit less work to do so the chances are you'll still do a pretty good job of extracting it even at that slightly quicker flow rate so small tweaks are okay as long as we're in the ballpark of good but if you're a long way from good I wouldn't touch the dose keep it a constant and go back again now there's one more variable I want to talk about there's a couple of quick things first every video right now has a giveaway if you are out of work if you're laid off if you're struggling and you need a pack of coffee there's a link in the description down below I'll send 10 bags anywhere in the world to the winners of those things on the condition that they can't afford coffee if you can't afford coffee please buy local support great businesses and I can do this because these videos have a sponsor in this case the sponsor is Skillshare Skillshare is an online learning community full of thousands of classes for creative and curious people like you and me now in the past I've used Skillshare to up my technical skills around video making classes on there have helped me shoot better video capture better sound do a better job lighting myself but I don't just use it for work-related stuff I use it for my kind of passion projects too I've been really getting back into photography there's a fantastic class by Amy Vitale on documentary photography capturing people and places and hearing a National Geographic photographer talk about her process seeing her work is hugely valuable and I love that in the same place I can go and learn about lomography get a little bit deeper into film photography that is truly obsessing me at the moment as a premium member for less than $10 a month or an annual subscription you have unlimited access to every single class on there and for the first thousand subscribers the first thousand of you to click the link in the description down below there's two three months of Skillshare premium think of how much you could learn in the next couple of months thank you so much to Skillshare for sponsoring this video the last thing that we need to talk about that is important to me that I don't really see discussed anywhere is caffeine the more ground coffee you start with the more caffeine is going to end up in the beverage that you drink caffeine is highly water soluble so generally speaking a bigger dose of ground coffee equals a bigger dose of caffeine now you like me probably really enjoy making espresso it's a bear in mind that the more ground coffee that you dose in each shot that you drink well the less time in a day you should probably be making espresso by pulling lower dose shots you can pull more shots in a day and not over caffeinate yourself we used to mock the Italians for that kind of 14 gram double that seven gram single how could you use just seven grams of ground coffee but on the upside it means they get to drink a lot of coffee in the day and that's pretty good so do bear that in mind think a little bit about the impact of just how much coffee you're drinking on you know how many shots you can pull in a day but maybe you're not like me maybe you just like to use caffeine as like a big 2x4 to the head to get your going in the morning and well we've all been there but if sometimes you want to pull a few more shots already spend some time with a coffee then drop that dose set yourself up to pull more shots have some fun but I'd be interested to hear from you what I haven't talked about when it comes to dose what have I missed what else needs to be discussed what else do you want to hear in the upcoming parts of this series what do you want to make sure that I cover I'd love to hear from you down in the comments below but for now I'm gonna say thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a great day

Channel: James Hoffmann

Views: 1,137,027

Rating: 4.9241452 out of 5

Keywords: james hoffmann, james hoffman, jimseven, coffee, square mile coffee, square mile coffee roasters, espresso, espresso machine, espresso grinder, home espresso, dialing in espresso, making espresso, dialing in espresso grinder, single espresso basket, reading an espresso shot, espresso tools, home espresso tools, dial in your espresso grinder, how i dial in espresso, best espresso, better espresso, espresso dose, dosing espresso, coffee dose

Id: aTFsBqhpLes

Length: 12min 22sec (742 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 07 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Anomander]

This is a reasonably substantial video with reasonably substantial content; our normal rules would ask that image & video submissions be accompanied by an informative or substantial comment.

I'm going to bump this through with an one-off exception because it's clearly a good fit; but want to make a point of reminding the community that "James Hoffman" is not a guarateed or even frequent exception to our rules, and ask that fans submitting his videos in the future to please make a point of adding the required comment.

[M] already deals with perception that this community and, by extension, mods, play favourites towards Mr Hoffman and give him special treatment. There are a lot of youtube spammers & wannabe influencers who do not understand the difference between themselves and Mr Hoffman, or see those differences as "rationalization" or similar.

[u/SwiftCEO]

I’m going to be honest. I’ve fallen asleep to his videos — quite soothing.

[u/eatblueshell]

This is nearly identical to the lecture I give on dose in my shop with the same analogies and everything.

Good to know I am on the right track.

[u/tsi0u]

James, are you there? We definitely need a similar series for pour-over coffee! <3

[u/jake_jake1]

I really like his videos. Insightful and seemingly original content.

[u/alittleatypical]

Hoffmann back at it again! Excited for this series.

Edit: spelling!

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/thesamgreen]

He’s the best

[u/Jubelot]

I just got a reddit notification on this post while i was watching the actual video on youtube.