Not everyone is making Decent coffee: thoughts on how to improve that
While on tour of Europe last year (18 months ago) I asked people (over a casual drink at night) which group they felt they were part of:
- I consistently make good coffee
- I occasionally make good coffee
- I never make good coffee
While at the events, everyone is “I love Decent” and no criticism is ever heard, at these evening events, I got honesty. That was very useful!
About 1/3rd of people fit into each category.
- The “consistently” group all used these profiles: Londonium, D-Flow, Adaptive, Extramundo Dos, Allongé.
- The “never” group all *always* used the earliest built in profiles, especially E61 and “classic italian espresso”. I'd also find people with 2.5ml/s steam flow rates, because “it was the most powerful steam”.
- The “occasionally” group tended to use lots of different profiles, experimenting a lot (too much, I think), though”Sweet and Gentle” and “Blooming” was mentioned in this group often too.
My learning from these chats is why I've put such a push on changing things, launching Streamline, changing the default profiles, and why I making 2025 the year I launch Groupthink.
A very common outcome of those meals was the people in the “consistently” group offering to meet the others, and help them out. This almost always happened, and whatsapp numbers were traded. I never suggest they do this: it just always happened naturally. That's also why I want this Groupthink feature to happen.
I also think that the DE1 community should likely settle on a fewer number of roasters, that we know are good, that we collectively know how to extract well. Let's first try to simply the problem, solve it, and then we can worry about adding greater complexity. I completely agree with Luca's comment that “most beans are bad”, just as I'd say that “almost all coffee from cafes is bad”.
Getting people to never use those beans, would be good first step. And then, once they have good beans, getting them to use the 2 or 3 profiles that actually make good good coffee, easily, from those beans. And then have small groups where people help each other with the remaining issues. “Small groups” is key, so that helping folks don't get burnt out, and geographical proximity (yielding language and cultural proximity, usually) helps motivate.
John Weiss made several comments on my article.
1. There are too many profiles in the DE1 app distro, many of which are essentially identical. Damian's D-Flow approach is better: one easily-adjustable profile, rather than dozens of overlapping versions of the same basic profile.
Totally agree on both points:
- many profiles could be coalesced into one, with some sort of profile-specific GUI controls, to move between them.
- most profiles could be moved to the cloud, as part of a “profile store”, modelled after something like the Google Chrome Extensions store.
Both those are currently occurring, and we'll see the way profiles are found, shared, and discussed, change quite a bit in 2025.
4. I offer myself as a counterexample to the “never” group: my favorite profile has always been a declining pressure profile (aka spring lever). IMHO the extractions are consistently good, and far more dependent on bean quality than the profile itself.
Londonium, D-Flow and Adaptive look broadly like the Spring Lever profile, with the major variable being whether there is a pause after the puck is saturated, and if so, for how long.
In this article entitled The Four Mother Recipes I argue that the physics of puck erosion make the argument that a lever profile is what respects the puck. A constant flow extraction will automatically create that Lever Profile, as if by magic (physics! and reality!)
In fact, you recently posted thoughts on the Maro, suggesting that a gradually increasing flow rate is a Good Thing. This is exactly what the classic flat 9 bar profile should do. As the puck erodes, resistance drops, and maintaining constant pressure causes flow to increase.
I believe that fines migration mitigates a lot of the need for an increasing flow rate during extraction.
However, because there's been a strong general trend toward fewer fines in the grinder market, I think an increasing flow rate during extraction is now needed to compensate, otherwise most espressos experience a very fast pressure crash during extraction.
#thoughts #profiles #improvements
Updated 2025/01/28