Beginner Home Barista Collection

Chocolate Brownie Blend - A stonking rich, bold & chocolatey blend - very forgiving for espresso, and perfect for milkies! More Info

Chocolate Fondant Blend - Bold, punchy with deep luxurious slightly toasty chocolate notes, this is one you have to try! More Info

Fruitcake Blend - A delicious spicy & fruity coffee, reminiscent of Christmas cake, easy to dial in for espresso. More Info

Fruit & Nut Blend - Lovely, enjoyable & easy drinking blend of two speciality single origins, fruit & nut heaven! More Info

How to Use the Beginner Home Barista Collection

Obviously you can use these beans however you like, but if you're using them while starting to hone your home barista skills, here's a tip for how to get the best from them.

The first thing to mention, is that if you (or the person you're buying them for) have literally just got your espresso machine and haven't yet had any experience at all of dialling in beans you might want to just start out with a Kilo of the same beans, before starting out with 250g bags of different beans. 

Starting out with 1Kg of of Chocolate Brownie blend for example, and then moving on to the home barista collection box, would make things slightly easier to learning to dial in.

Decisions Decisions...

Four very nice coffees here, where do you start!?

A quick tip - I'd recommend waiting (if you can, it won't make a massive difference if you can't) until 3-5 days from roast date to start using the beans.

You'll notice they're all roasted on the day of despatch, or in some cases one or two of them may have been roasted the day before, so leaving them a few days to degas (release CO2) is best practice. 

When it comes to the order to use them, if you've already had one of these beans, you'll be familiar with them, so that would be a good starting point. 

If not, I'd start out with Chocolate Brownie or Chocolate fondant, these are the most forgiving beans in the box.

Once you've worked your way through these two, I'd move on to Fruit Cake, you'll find a slightly finder grind size will help here, and maybe just a slightly bigger ratio.

The most challenging bean in the box is Fruit & Nut blend, they're perfect for the last bag to be used from the box. You'll find these benefit from a slightly finer grind than fruitcake blend, and if your machine has adjustable brew temp, a notch hotter would be a good idea.

The best approach to beginning to dial in is to see ratio and grind size as your two main variables to adjust, and to leave everything else the same, most of the time. Although, if your machine has adjustable brew temperature, keep in mind that when you're making quite a big jump in roast profile, a change in brew temp may be very useful.

Ratio is the relationship between the dose weight and the amount of espresso, so pulling a bigger shot with the same dose, increases the ratio. 

If you're getting unwanted, unpleasant acidity in the shot, this is the taste of under extraction, so you need to extract more.

If you just pull a bigger shot with the same dose, you'll extract more, easy peasy. However when you do this you're increasing the extraction but also you're reducing the intensity and the body. 

This is why we'd usually focus mainly on adjusting the grind finer in order to extract more, so that we don't sacrifice intensity or mouthfeel, but also an increased brew temperature will lead to a greater extraction. 

Up to a certain point, you can get away with sacrificing a small amount of intensity and body without an overall detriment to the cup quality, so most of the time, especially with more entry level grinders or integrated grinder machines, using ratio in addition to grind size is a great approach. 

An example of how I'd go about this, is that I'd start out by anticipating a required grind size adjustment based on the next coffee I'm using (this comes with practice), and I'd pull a shot at around a 1:2 ratio, for example about 40ml of espresso from about 18g of coffee.

I'd then be led in part by the numbers (shot time) but mainly by taste, and I'll then change one thing at a time, either the ratio or the grind size, until I think I've nailed the balance. 

If this approach doesn't seem to be working, sometimes I'll make an adjustment to the brew temperature, if I'm using a machine with adjustable temp, although (again this comes with experience) I'll often start out by making a temp adjustment if I know the beans I've just opened are quite a bit different.

For loads more on this see Kev's dialling in playlist.