10 minute challenge #2: latte, 2x DE1 (#2)
This is my first attempt at making lattes as fast as I can, on two Decent DE1XL espresso machines.
TLDR: I made 5 lattes, and spilled one. Scott Rao tells me that my goal should be 8 lattes in 10 minutes per barista, which would almost meet his peak when he ran his Montreal café. He hit 100 drinks/hour with two baristas on pro gear.
Lessons learned:
- I need to find one workflow, and stick to it.
- When I deviate from my workflow, I make mistakes. Lots of them. I spill drinks, I forget to prep a portafilter. I forget to hit START.
- I made 5 lattes, but would have made 6 if I hadn't spilled one on the floor, and possibly 7 lattes if I'd remembered to hit START sooner on another.
- Ghost (hands-free) steaming works well in all cases, with the new (coming in April) DE1XL steam wand.
- The auto-steam-off timer didn't produce reliable results. In order for it to be reliable, that feature needs the same amount of cool milk each time. If I don't use all the milk in the pitcher for one drink, and leave it in, my steaming time now needs to be shorter. If I don't pay attention to this, I'll overheat the milk.
- So, measuring milk correctly is important, so that I use all of it for each drink.
- I usually make flat white in these cups, for myself, steaming by hand (not hands free). However, ghost steaming creates latte-style foam, which is more voluminous. To compensate, I should have reduced the cold milk volume per drink from 150ml to 120ml. The extra 30ml I hadn't planned on was being used in the next drink. This was the cause of the uneven final temperature results when using timed milk steaming here. Or perhaps I should have thrown away excess milk each each pour (though I really dislike waste).
I spoke to Scott Rao about speed goals for cafes. He told me that, all optimised, his cafe in Montreal could crank out 100 lattes per hour, with two baristas on a La Marzocco pro machine (not sure if it was 2 or 3 group).
Per barista, this works out to 50 lattes per hour.
That works to a bit more than 8 lattes made in ten minutes (8.33, to be exact). That's 48 lattes/hour, per barista. With two baristas at two stations, each with 2 DE1XXL models, would get us to 96 lattes per hour.
So now I know my goal: to move up from 5 lattes/ten-minutes, to 8 in ten minutes.
In future episodes we'll be trying:
- pre-weighed bean doses
- a faster grinder
- not screwing up
-john
Updated 2021/02/19