Hi, I’m Paolo from “Le Piantagioni del Caffè” and in this video, I’ll show you how to calibrate your grind when your coffee is brewing too quickly.

Now let’s see what happens in the case of a coarse grind, not a correct grind, but a coarse one with ground particles that, when we turn on the espresso machine, the 9 bars of pressure will pass through the ground particles too easily, resulting in a coffee that will come up high in the cup so technically it will be an over-extracted brew with, from an organoleptic point of view, bitter notes and also astringency.

In the instance of an over-extracted coffee, we need to change the grind because we’ve got too coarse a grind: when the water passes through the cloth filter at 9 bars, it does so too quickly. We need to give it more resistance, a finer grind. Here, by bringing the burrs closer together, if we don’t remove the coffee in the grinding chamber, we risk the burrs getting stuck. So, what should we do? We need to close the hopper gate, empty the grinding chamber until we can feel that the burrs are turning freely and we reduce the grind.

Every grinder has dials with different settings, so obviously at the beginning we need to understand how much each dial, as we increase or decrease, adjusts the grain size of the grind. Once calibrated, here we moved towards zero by bringing the burrs closer together, we open the hopper gate again and dispense our dose.

We’ll find the right calibration when, starting, as in this case, with a single dose of 16 g ground coffee, we will get double the liquid in around 25 seconds of brewing, so about 32 g of extracted coffee.