Hi, I’m Paolo from “Le Piantagioni del Caffè” and in this video, I’ll show you the correct work routine and how to leave the grinder at the end of the day.

First, I’ll show you how you should leave the grinder when we finish our shift or when we are closing our café. So, first we close the gate separating the hopper from the grinding chamber and empty any remaining coffee from the grinding chamber.

At this point, the grinding chamber is completely empty and we can simply switch off our grinder. In the morning, the first thing we should do, is check whether our grind is right. So we do the opposite: we turn on the grinder, open the hopper gate, at this point the coffee drops down into the grinding chamber, and we simply grind a double dose of coffee. When we do this, we are always using a double portafilter precisely because of the design of the filter itself, which lets us get a more even brew.

So, after grinding, we evenly distribute our coffee inside the filter: we can help ourselves further with a dosing funnel, and we move on to tamping. We take hold of the tamper, so that our arm up to the elbow follows a straight line, no bends and, before we tamp, we check that the tamper is perfectly aligned with the grind so that once we press down the coffee is completely parallel to the filter. The amount of pressure required is the amount that allows us to compact the coffee until we can feel that it won’t compress any more.

Once the coffee has been tamped into the filter we do a water flush or purge to get rid of any remaining dirty water from the previous brew. Then we gently slot our portafilter into the brewing unit and we calibrate our cups using a scale and we start brewing to check that, in the end, the brew ratio, the ratio of the quantity of ground coffee to the liquid in the cup in a given time, in this case brewed in 25 seconds, is around 1 to 2. The amount of liquid should be approximately twice the weight of the ground coffee initially.