Upgrading my coffee experience with a new coffee machine! | Ecency

I've recent purchased a new coffee machine and bean grinder!

We've (myself and my dad) have spent a good few weeks researching about various coffee machines and bean grinders trying to figure out what the best value for money and how much we want to spend.

We decided to go all in, within reason. We were thinking of going full professional machine at a cost of £1500 but opted to stay under £500 for the coffee machine itself.

First things first though! What was we using before? How big of an upgrade did we get?

Well. A little more background here, We generally drink 5-6 cups of coffee a day, not for the caffeine but for the flavour, we like the taste of coffee, we also drink about the same in cups of tea as well. We are British after all.

So with that in mind this is the machine we were using previously.

A DolceGusto pod based machine with stainless steel pods so we can have our own coffee and use milk powder.

Needless to say it didn't make very good coffee, at least not what you'd expect from a cafe or professional place, We actually always enjoyed the coffee we made but we knew it wasn't 'proper coffee'.

Another factor in replacing this machine was that the 'compatible' pods didn't always work correctly and often made a mess.

So what do we have now?

Well we have this lot..

That's right.. We went all in, but not all the way in. We've gone from a pod based coffee machine to a Gaggia Classic 2019 edition with a sage smart grinder, We also have stainless steel milk jugs for milk frothing, a knockbox and other extras.

Yesterday (17-2-21) was when the coffee machine arrived, once we got it set up and primed we stood there for 7 hours trying to make a decent coffee.

WE FAILED!

My god it's a difficult task getting good coffee, we can't get the tamp consistent, Really could do with a 30 pound scale to measure the tamp pressure we making.

We unsure about the grind at the moment, we gotta dial that in and figure out what works with what roasts and such.

We're struggling with brew times due to the grind due to the tamp due too OMG there are so many variables.

We are also struggling to figure out which taste is which, is it bitter or sour... we don't know. xD

Still. Today we had another crack at it and it's getting better. Practice is what we gotta do. we'll figure it out.

We also need to practice frothing milk as right now.. we get very little froth.

We knew what we were getting into.

Yeap.. We knew all this before hand. We saw all this complex stuff when we were doing research, and we thought 'yeah we can do that easy'.

HA well, it's not easy but we sure are getting better.

We also don't actually know what decent coffee tastes like in the first place, sooooo. We're just going to make coffee over and over and just find what we like.

We're also due too order some more coffee from @whiterosecoffee as we're running low trying to get a decent brew going and the current coffee we do have is fast approaching it's best by date of 3 month after opening. We did store it in the freezer so might last a little longer but certainly it's not the freshest coffee.