Let me explain.

I've been doing videos about how I dial an espresso.

My picture and back is picking coffee.

You pick a machine, pick a grinder and I dialled a coffee and talk my way through the process.

I've done three of these videos on dhe.

I've been grateful for a lot of feedback.

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 dialing in a bunch of a random, different coffees from all over the world.

This first episode is on dose on the amount of coffee that you put in the porta filter, 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 final when to go coarser winter.

Leave it alone and brew temperature.

We're not gonna 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 bring express, sir.

All right, we're gonna achieve RSP, 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.

Read the key idea behind what we're doing when we're bring coffee is we're extracting soluble material from the ground coffee.

The more of this we extract, the better to appoint this kind of a lopsided bell curve right?

The more you extracted 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 off the 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 and an oven and weigh it again and you to 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 refract Ah mater's 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 the extraction, you have to work harder.

And that's really important when you're thinking about dose because the Maur ground coffee that you start with, the more work you're going to have to do to properly extract 18 grams, requires 20% MB or 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 easy to do more work with a better grinder.

Similarly, high quality espresso machines generally have better component tree, but a quality more even.

There's better water dispersion about a water temperature.

Just that 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.

Where and we're deciding what does 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 dose reference on them rough kind of guide to how much coffee should use the S T baskets, for instance, want comers in 19 grand basket a 20 ground basket and give or take one gram.

That's probably what that basket should be using and generally speaking, that isn't 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 on the shower screen, where the water came from and at the end of the shot went.

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 park on 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 got an old school classic Italian espresso machine probably started 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 that 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 grand order.

Now grinders are absolutely designed to grand order, so we can use whatever does.

We won't and there's no more messing around and doing the dozing 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 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 light arrest coffee.

You gotta 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 gonna 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 that high density coffee's coffee's grown a high elevation, washed, confused.

Typically well, they were harder to extract.

It's a reasonable rule of from generally speaking logo and coffees are easier to extract on high ground 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 feel set up.

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 grand setting, you need to grind through a little bit of coffee because it retains a bit of ground coffee.

That was the old grand setting, so to speak.

So you grunt 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 on you 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.

It was like it was like, okay, but need a little tweak, but you can't go much.

Coffee left its precious, the 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 on the longer the contact time will be to get to your desire a share.

And in this case, it may push your shot from a 25 2nd shot to a 28 29 2nd shot on that small, increasing contact time.

You're gonna keep your ratio the same, going over 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 you're in the ballpark of good.

But if you're a long way from good, I wouldn't touch the does keep it a constant and go back again.

Now there's one more variable I want to talk about is a couple quick things first.

Every video right now has a giveaway if you are out of work.

If you laid off, if you're struggling and you need a bag 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 by local support, great businesses.

And I can do this because these videos have a sponsor.

In this case, the sponsor is skill share.

Skill.

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There's a fantastic class by Amy Vitali documentary photography, capturing people and places and hearing a National Geographic photographer talk about her process.

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Thank you so much to skill share 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 mortgage round Coffee You start with, the more caffeine is gonna 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 very mind that the more ground coffee that you does in each shot that you drink well, the less time in a day you should probably be making espresso by pulling lower does shots.

You can pull more shots in a day and not over caffeinated yourself.

We used to mock the Italians further, kind of 14 grand, 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.

I 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 the day?

But maybe you're not like me.

Maybe you'd just like to use Caffeine is like a Big two by four to the head to get you going in the morning and, well, we've all been there.

But if sometimes you want to pull a few more shots, really 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 Siri's?

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.