Quote:
Originally Posted by €uroMeinke
Yeah the beans are important, but French Press is the best preparation for good beans.
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Making a good cup of espresso is like assembling a fine watch or performing microsurgery; minor mistakes and slight contamination ruin the finished product.
I always start by thoroughly brushing the old grounds out of my grinder. I favor sable paint brushes because the old oil adheres to them better. I've also come to the conclusion that one must sacrifice a scoop of beans to avoid having to push necessary amounts of finely ground beans into the basket with my fingers, thus contaminating the coffee with skin oil.
The other thing I've started to do is take a damp paper towel and wipe down the heads of the espresso maker itself. Why clean the grinder if the water is going to be pumped through heads caked with yesterday's grounds?
Now comes the tricky part. Paper towels contain acid; small flecks of paper will inevitably stick to the expresso heads, and the fact that they are wet means that some of that acid will leech out onto the espresso heads, ruining the Ph balance of the coffee.
So what I do is I take one of those Sharper Image minivacs, the kind men use to vacuum dead skin cells out of their pubic hair, and I hold it close to--but not against--the espresso machine heads. This does the trick and yields a perfect cup of espresso every time.
The minivacs are a bit pricey, but it's worth it. Of course, if you live with someone, you'll probably have to buy two just to keep the peace. Much in the way that when I started going through a quart a day of stewed tomatoes for prostate health, my wife made me buy my own baster.