I’ve been doing things to coffee in the name of espresso for a couple of years now. Bad things. I started with a Mr. Coffee steam espresso maker from Target. $39. I so wanted to make ‘Good Espresso.’ Boy was I failing.

A while back I wandered into a local roaster, Valhalla Coffee, and had a macchiato. This is actually a picture from that day, I was so impressed with it. Here was coffee that tasted amazing. While I was sitting there enjoying my coffee, I had a look at David Schomer’s book they had out on the bar. I sat and read a lot, and came away inspired. The book talked about things I’d never heard before, about pressure, grind, extraction, etc. Something clicked in my brain, and I had to try to accomplish this, not on his insane chemist / scientist scale but, on some level.  David’s first career had something to with scientific measurement.  That probably has a fancy name.  Those skills no doubt helped him become a brilliant mad coffee scientist.

I posted on facebook that I was looking for a machine, and a friend graciously gave me his Starbucks Barista Athena machine, and I’ve been hobbying with it for a few weeks. I’m hooked.

The Barista is made by Saeco.  It’s a decent little machine, has a brave little pump, and an adequate boiler capacity.  Hard to make lots of shots for a party, but for morning coffee, it’s great, and the price was right.  The portafilter on the Barista is a clever device, with a spring-loaded valve that lets the coffee through after a certain amout of pressure builds in the portafilter, as a way of pre-infusing the coffee – something I read about in Shomer’s book.

The problem with the portafilter is it limits how much you can adjust the quality of your shots.  You can only do so much to adjust grind and tamp pressure to vary your brew time, etc.  My first effort at modifying the portafilter was an evening wasted.  At that time, I was still letting valhalla grind my beans, and I was using a crappy tamp.  So all I got was crud.

The real time waster, after I realized the folly of my ways, was putting the portafilter back into functional condition.  The spring mechanism is a tender little thing.  And one of the stumps that props the left side of the spring simply broke off.  See the red arrow?  That’s pointing at a piece of a chopstick.     Need I say more?  The black arrow points at a stump that is the approximate size of the missing piece.  Thankfully, the nice square hole was almost perfect for fitting with a chopstick.  I was worried about it popping out, so I superglued it in there.

When I ordered a nice, 53mm tamp from Espresso Supply in Seattle and started grinding my own beans, I was again ready to pop the guts out of the portafilter and try to adjust for the perfect cup with grind and pressure.

I was pleasantly surprised.  I made one cup that extracted too slowly, came out in drips, and tasted bitter, although very drinkable.  So I tried again; I didn’t powder the grind quite as much, and eased off on the tamp, and I got a significantly better-timed shot.

The photo was an after-thought (from my droid), after I sipped around on ‘em.  The shot on the right was actually the better of the two, but the goods have been sipped off the top, so it doesn’t look like much, but it had a non-bitter, nutty flavor that was really nice.  Both have been adulterated with a little milk.

In a few short weeks, I have managed to get really hooked on espresso.  A friend the other day told me about putting some brown sugar in the shot and drinking it straight.  Wow, that’s really good, too.

So if you have a Barista or other machine with a pressurized portafilter, be brave and pop out the mechanism and play around with it.  You’ll get better coffee.  Are my shots perfect?  Heck no, but it wouldn’t be any fun if it were easy.  I like a challenge.