How to dial in coffee: Getting that shot tasting right every time

Small tweaks can make a big difference

A lot goes into making a good cup of coffee. No matter whether you like a latte, cappuccino, or are a bit of a purist like me and prefer a double shot of espresso as your daily driver, all good coffee starts with the dialing-in process. Effectively, you're on the hunt for the perfect double shot of espresso to start off your drink, and there's a lot that can go wrong if you just haphazardly hack away at it with little care in the world.

Whether you're brewing at home or are a fully-fledged barista working in a cafe, nothing is more important to the overall quality and taste of your drink than making sure your espresso is dialed in correctly. Your milk can be silky smooth and on point, latte art phenomenal, and presentation exceptional, but if your espresso is out of whack, you may as well chuck it all down the drain. Yep, it's that important.

 

The Hunt For The Perfect Shot

With every coffee-based drink, what we should be looking for is a well-rounded double shot of espresso with taste characteristics that are balanced, nuanced, and predominantly work well for your palate or for that of your customers. 

There are a few things we can do to alter and change how it's going to taste through that initial shot process. From the grind to the shot time, all of it has an effect on the overall flavor. If you get it wrong, then one characteristic can massively overpower another, leaving you with a fairly bland drink or one that's far too bitter. Neither of which are preferable.

Coffee tasting, admittedly, can be a bit pretentious. You'll no doubt have seen flavor notes on coffee bags from your favorite roasters or watched some of the coffee tasting competitions out there on Instagram and YouTube where experts and baristas alike will be slurping away at cups and V60s aiming to identify what specific blueberry tasting note that particular coffee has and where it's from. Here at Hips, though, we like to simplify things a bit, and just work with the basics first. Let me explain.

Coffee can be broadly defined by four key characteristics:

• Acidity: Think citric, lemons, fruits, that crispness that sits on the tongue. If you've got a penchant for sharp tastes, you'll know this flavor well.
  
  
• Bitterness: The other side of the coin to acidity. It's that almost acrid, intense flavor; hoppy beer, cranberries, and dark chocolate are all good examples, which sit at the back of the throat.
  
  
• Sweetness: That's of course the sugary sweet taste you'll find from sugarcane, sweets, and certain fruits.
  
  
• Body: How thick and syrupy the coffee is when pulled. Sometimes it can be thick like a liqueur; other times, it can be like whole milk or even a watery shot instead. Crema (the orangey brown "cream" on top of an espresso helps a lot with this too).
  

Generally, as coffee lovers, we tend to focus on the acidity and the bitterness first and foremost. Don't worry about if you can or can't taste fresh white grapes, pink lemonade, or anything of that nature; just focus on the taste itself. When drinking a good coffee, think about the acidity as you taste it. Can you taste that? Does it taste good? Then think about the bitterness. What's that like? Are you a fan?

 

How to Dial in Your Coffee

When we refer to dialing in coffee, what we're effectively talking about is how you adjust your grinder to get the perfect shot for you. Now at Hips we use a fairly standard recipe that's been well established across the coffee industry. First originating predominantly from Australia and New Zealand.

In short, our recipe is as follows:

• 18g of freshly ground coffee in
• 36g of espresso out
• 9.2 bars of pressure
• 92° C hot, filtered water
• 28-32 second shot time (including pre-infusion).

This is known as the 1:2 ratio in the world of coffee. We put 18g of fresh coffee in and get 36g of espresso out. We do this based on volumetrics with our machines, so every time we request the bar pulls a double shot, it'll push an exact amount of water through the puck each and every time. If your espresso bar doesn't have that feature, you can equally weigh out each shot at home using a set of high-quality weighing scales that you place underneath the cup. Once it reaches your 1:2 ratio, you can then stop the shot.

18g in, 36g out, the perfect start to any coffee based drink (Image Credit: Hips Social)

The reason we use weight of espresso, rather than volume in a shot glass, is because coffee volume varies wildly dependent on a whole host of factors. The bean type, the intensity of the roast, and how long it's been since the err beans have been roasted all have an effect on how much crema you get and thus how much volume the shot takes up in the cup. So it's far more accurate for us to use weight instead.

Aside from shot weight, the other wildly important element when it comes to flavor is how long it takes for that shot to pour. In short, we're trying to find a perfectly balanced shot that manages to keep that acidity in check with a touch of bitterness and a sweet sensation running throughout the shot as well. That's why we aim for that 28-32 second shot time, with 30 seemingly being a "perfect" shot for the vast majority of coffees.

 

What Causes Those Flavors?

We refer to ground coffee particles as fines, particularly in relation to their size. Understanding how and why which element creates those key flavors in coffee is the pursuit of many a modern scientific endeavor and is still quite the mystery, even today. 

What we do know is that generally speaking, a chemical element called chlorogenic acid is likely the primary culprit for that key bitter taste. Yeah, an acidic compound makes a bitter taste. Wild, eh? In short, when coffee is roasted above a certain temperature, that chlorogenic acid compound shifts into a lactone, which, when interacting with the tongue, creates that bitter taste we all know and love. 

It is, however, remarkably difficult to pull that lactone from the coffee grounds directly (or fines). This is why we use hot water and pressure to extract the flavor. The longer the coffee grounds are in contact with water, the more of these lactones are released in the shot, and the stronger the bitterness in the coffee becomes. This is amplified by increasing the overall surface area of the coffee (smaller fines, or ground coffee). If the coffee grinds are too large, then water has an easier time passing through the puck, and there's less surface area for it to react with to pull out that chlorogenic acid lactone.

Chlorogenic acid lactones are a polyphenol and highly beneficial to the human body, acting as an antioxidant, with recent studies suggesting that they're potentially effective at reducing blood pressure, improving circulation, reducing inflammation, and even helping to maintain your gut microbiome. So your Long Black not only tastes good, but it's great for your health too.

 

It's All About Time

Most modern espresso bars will allow you to configure the volume of water you push through each shot. The coffee puck (made of ground, tamped coffee) will then act as resistance against that water. The finer the coffee grounds, the more difficult it is for that water to pass through, and the longer the shot takes, pulling out more of that chlorogenic acid lactone. The larger the grounds, the easier it is, and the less time is spent pulling that bitter element out.

Timing is everything, if a shot runs too long it'll be too bitter. Too short, too acidic. (Image Credit: Hips Social)

If you were to take three double espressos, one finishing at 20 seconds, one at 30 seconds, and one at 40 seconds, the first would be excessively acidic, the latter excessively bitter, and the middle one just right, as the two flavors balance each other out. Sweetness, similar to body forms throughout the shot process.

 

Adjusting The Grind

A good coffee grinder should have a set of burrs inside (metal blades effectively) that allow you to adjust the distance between them, giving you a coarser or finer grind. The coarser the grind, the larger the coffee grinds, and well, you guessed it: the finer they are, the smaller they are.

What we're trying to do is keep our coffee grounds in a state where we can maintain that 30-second shot time. There's a whole host of things that will affect that time and the grind at any given time, so it's important to understand those basics.

"Dialing in coffee" is the act of taking your coffee, running a few shots, adjusting the grind to find the right settings for the coffee in question (and your own palette), and then having a consistent, beautiful tasting final result.

 

The Process

With all that out of the way, this is how we dial in a new bag of coffee at Hips (or just adjust our grinders in the morning). Depending on the site, we use either a Victoria Arduino Mythos One or a Mahlkonig E65S as our primary house grinder. These are commercial-grade machines, both featuring burrs: the Mythos One utilizes a set of 75mm burrs, and the E65S runs 65mm burrs.

So to begin we:

1. Make sure the grinders are on and the burrs are warm (both the Mythos and the Mahlkonig keep the burrs a consistent temperature throughout the day).

2. Grind off a shot of coffee first and dispose of it in a waste bin (in our case, a knock tube). We throw this first "shot" out, as these are beans that were stuck in the burrs from the shift or the night before. They'll potentially be at a different setting or too hot compared to the rest of the beans in the hopper.

3. We then grind another shot and run this through the espresso bar, distributed and tamped appropriately, noting the time this first shot took to pour on the old settings.

4. If the shot is shorter than 27 seconds, then we adjust the grind setting so it's finer. If it's longer than 33 seconds, adjust the grind so it's coarser. 

5. Do this part slowly, without big swings in the grind setting, as small tweaks lead to big changes in shot pour time.

6. With our grind setting adjusted, we then grind off another "shot" of coffee, disposing of it again, to allow the burrs to set into their new position.

7. Check whether the new grind setting has improved our shot time enough, and then repeat. 

As a side note, it may take 1-2 additional shots or grinds for a new grind setting to "bed in" properly into the grinder and for you to start getting consistent shots of coffee, so don't be too quick to adjust things just because your first shot was a dud.

Speaking specifically for us, the Mythos One uses a timed system where we control how long it grinds for to ensure we get that 18g of coffee. The Mahlkonig uses a grind-by-weight system, where it weighs the coffee coming out first. 

Victoria Arduino's Mythos One is an industry legend, but it's grind by time setup is not for the faint of heart. (Image Credit: Hips Social)

For any time-based grinder, like the Mythos One we have, you'll need to use a coffee scale to measure out how much coffee you've ground per shot. Then, adjust the time setting appropriately, as it will shift as you adjust the coarseness of the grind. The coarser the grind setting, the quicker it will take to produce 18g of ground coffee, so reduce the time accordingly. The finer it is, the longer it will take. In the case of the Mythos (and most grinders in fact), you should be able to use a continual or manual mode to get a constant stream of coffee if you need a little extra or run a little short.

Similarly, if your timed setting grinds too much, use a spoon and carefully take a little ground coffee off the top before then distributing and tamping accordingly. It's worth noting you can weigh out coffee in multiple different ways. Some baristas and shops like to use a dosing cup to do that, grinding into the cup on a permanent set of scales underneath and then transferring to the group handle. Others prefer to weigh the handle directly, then grind directly into that and check the weight after. Honestly, both are effective methods; what matters is consistency in the weight of the coffee grounds.

 

Victoria Arduino Pro Tips - New Guest Beans

At Hips Social, we have a rotating guest coffee that changes quite often, sometimes from week to week. Different beans from different countries, roasted to different degrees by different roasteries, require different grind settings to get the most out of them. A dark roast will be more brittle and easier to break than a light roast, and vice versa.

When dialing in a radically different coffee, ensure your grinder is completely empty first. 

In the case of the Mythos One, what you can do is add your new beans to the hopper. Then use continuo to grind out a small portion to get the beans into the burrs and the shoot first.

Then from my own testing, I've found if you still use the scales but instead of relying on the pre-programmed shot time (which could be wildly out), instead use "continuo" mode and manually eyeball what 18g of coffee looks like generally in the group handle. Once you think you've got 18g, weigh the handle on the scale and see if you've hit it. Then, quickly look at the display to see how long it took to grind that much coffee.

Always weigh your coffee when you can. A set of precision scales helps a ton. (Image Credit: Hips Social)

If you need a little more, add a little more and add that additional time to the original continuo number in your head. Once you've got your 18g, run it through the machine, and if you get a good shot, you'll now know roughly what time you need on your profile setting. It's a far quicker way of dialing in coffee, particularly for grinders that don't have a grind-by-weight feature.

Also, on a side note, because we're working in fractions of a second, there's a slight delay in the time it takes for the burrs to spin up and begin grinding compared to the timer on the grinder. So if it's taken 5.45 seconds, plus 0.45 seconds, plus 0.23 seconds to get your 18g, instead of inputting 6.13 as your time, aim for around 0.05-7 seconds less than that.

 

Consistency, Consistency, Consistency

Ultimately, it's about managing variables and keeping your recipe consistent, tweaking one thing at a time. We try to keep a strict recipe (that 18g in 36g out), especially with our house blend, as it ensures a consistent flavor across all of our drinks and allows us to continually tweak the grind setting throughout the day easily enough. It ensures your Flat White tastes as good as it always does, every, single, time.

Everything from ambient temperature to humidity to how hot your coffee grinder's burrs are getting can affect the grind and shot characteristics. You can dial in your coffee at 7am in the morning, when your shop is 17° C and 25% humidity, only for it to be running at 25 seconds again by 9am at 22° C and 37% humidity. It's often a constant battle for a barista to keep coffee dialed in to that level all day long, and you'll often see a good barista continually dialing in through the day, particularly during large rushes. It's something every good speciality coffee shop will pride itself on. 

Not all coffee works to this exact recipe either; again, it is predominantly down to taste. If you prefer a more acidic coffee or have a bean that better suits that, then going for a shorter shot time can equally lead to an awesome-tasting drink.

Similarly, sometimes a lighter roast might be a little less intense in flavor characteristics than you might otherwise expect, so you might need to tweak your recipe to be a bit more coffee-heavy and run 19g in for 36g out instead. What matters is that you're consistent with it, find what you like, and then enjoy it. It really is such a varied field; however, as a standard baseline, the 1:2 ratio, 18 in 36 out at 30 seconds, is a fantastic place to start.