Becoming A Home Barista

The Basics

Right, now this is a question alot of baristas get so lets answer it here. Most baristas at some point will have been asked “how do you do these patterns? Usually followed by “at home mine are just bubbly.”

Now this post isn’t about how to pour patterns on your coffees, spoiler alert, that’s next week. This week is covering the basics of how to get great drinks at home without having to be an actual barista.

The Espresso Part

So, there’s two main types of home espresso machines, the first is lower budget machines, usually with a set of pressurised filter baskets, while the other is that of more expensive machines that are just mini versions of normal espresso machines as used in cafes.

All of the below is using a 2 shot group handle!

None of this applies for single cup/single shot baskets.

The Expensive Machines

The expensive machines are easier to get good results for espresso as they usually have a 58mm basket. This means they can fit the usual 18 grams of ground coffee for a fairly normal 1:2 espresso recipe, yielding 36 grams of liquid espresso out in around 20-30 seconds.

When trying to perfect this recipe be prepared for alot of trial and error when adjusting the grind size and the coffee your using. Yes, the coffee will impact what size you grind it to so you’ll need to repeat this process when using different coffee beans, (this is mainly due to different roast levels).

Start by dosing the 18 grams of ground coffee into your group handle’s basket, tamp it flat with some pressure and insert the handle into your machine’s group. Then start the extraction and with the scales under your cup just stop the extraction once you hit 36 grams of liquid, If from button press to stop took less than 20 seconds then make the grind size finer and vise versa for if the coffee drips out slowly and take longer than 30 seconds.

This process isn’t too hard as it’s what baristas do every morning to make sure the espresso is extracting to their required recipe. Trust me, it’s not as tricky as you may think.

Lower-end Espresso Machines

Next up is basically the same process but less worrying on grind size. Most of, if not all lower-end espresso machines for home use come with pressurised baskets, these look just like normal baskets but rather than having many holes for the espresso to pass through, they instead have many holes in the top part where the coffee goes, but in the bottom they only have 1. This helps build up pressure as the water passes through simulating the higher pressures of a regular espresso machine that runs at 9 bars.

Again as before you’ll be using trial and error with your coffee’s grind size to get your extraction at around 20-30 seconds, but for these machines as they usually have smaller baskets, I would recommend dosing the suggested amount in grams as the manufacturer states for your machine and allowing it to either run the full time of the button’s programming, (if its running in that 20-30 second area) or to stop it around the 1:2.25 mark so if your using 14 grams of coffee you would stop the extraction once 31 grams of liquid is shown on the scales.

Remember to adjust your grind size to match the time requirements:

Finer to slow it down and courser to speed it up!

Next week, as mentioned before will be on patterns you can try on your coffee at home, but it will also cover the basics of milk steaming to get you to that barista quality milk!

Thanks for reading! I hope you have a good week and some even better coffees!