How to use an espresso machine properly.

As you might already know, there are a couple things you should be mindful of when making espresso.
For this reason I want to cover some of the basics right here.

Make sure when you heat up your espresso machine to insert the portafilter. The metal of the portafilter has to be hot, to always have the same parameters. This way you get really consistently good results. With my Unica Pro this takes only about 2 minutes.

To get started, take out the portafilter and flush the brew group for 1 second. This will rinse the shower and gets the temperature of the water in the right temperature range. Because with most home machines, overheating might be a problem.

Clean the portafilter with a dry cloth. It’s kinda the same principle with the pan in the kitchen, before you use it the next time you clean it properly too.

Then we will prepare the coffee beans, I will use 18g of coffee and grind it directly into the portafilter.

Make sure to level the ground coffee in the portafilter.
A couple of taps should do the trick, till the coffee is evenly distributed. But you can also tap the portafilter lightly on the fork of your grinder.

The next step is tamping. Hold your tamper like an old fashion flash light with your thumb and index finger on the tamper base. Hold the portafilter on an edge of a table to get enough resistance and grip.

Best to keep your wrist in a straight line to the tamper, otherwise it will hurt after tamping thousands of coffees.

Try to tamp as evenly as possible. I try to feel this with the thumb and index finger.
The water will always find the way with the least resistance, and if you tamp uneven this would lead to a bad and uneven extraction.

Remove the remaining coffee crumbs on the rim of the portafilter.

Insert the portafilter in the espresso machine and start the extraction within a couple of seconds. Personally, I always have a scale underneath the cup, to measure the weight of the espresso and the extraction time.
The Unica Pro has this kinda built in, so I don’t have to use it that way anymore.
But the scale allows you to always get the same output in your cup. And in the end you want to have the best possible taste in every extraction you do.

I recommend to use a scale for dialling in your coffee, as this will save you a lot of time, coffee and nerves. Alternatively you could also use a measure glass to see how much espresso you are extracting, but it will never be as exact as it would be with a scale.

This should help to handle your espresso machine in the right way.