As you may or may not know, I am a bit of a coffee snob. I know what I like, and I am likely to turn up my nose when I don’t like something. Once you have tasted some real coffee, and not that instant muck  from Nescafé, you will realise that not all coffee was created equal. Above all coffee should be created fresh. This starts with the beans being ground fresh then making sure that the water from a fresh source. Also for my coffee mug, you should really heat it in advance. Then of course there is the choice of beans.  Here is a quick video of what I call my 2nd girlfriend. A DeLonghi Magnifica , which retails at about €400-€550 here in Germany. I picked mine up from a nice American for half price because she was heading back stateside.  The bean hopper can store about 300g of beans. It grinds the beans internally and stores the spent coffee in a little internal bucket afterwards. They look like little hocky pucks when they come ou !  The water source at the side can hold about 1.5L of water, which is good for about 10 coffees.
That reminds me I should really do something with my coffee website , but in the mean time you should check out The Other Black Stuff which is a great Irish blog on the topic of coffee.
Nice! From the video it looks like there might be room to reduce the grind slightly. The “blonding” that occurs in the coffee stream should happen around the 20 sec mark, but is happening a little early in this pour (11 seconds). You’ll get a deeper/thicker flavour.
Cheers Marcus, will try that. You mean reduce the amount of coffee or the granularity of the grinding ?
Make the grind finer… You’ll need to experiment, but when the coffee stream changes colour from tan to translucent, this should mark the end of the pour. On a manual machine, this is the signal to stop the pour. Take a look at http://www.home-barista.com/espresso-guide-good-extractions.html which explains things a lot better than I possibly could!
There are 3 variables in making espresso: qty of coffee, coarseness of the grind and tamp pressure. The art is getting all three lined up perfect. On an automatic machine, you generally don’t have control over the tamp pressure or the qty of coffee. Hence the only variable you can play with is the grind.
Cheers Marcus, will happily experiment today with a few cups of coffee. Thanks for pointing it out !
On the DeLonghi Magnifica you can change , coarseness of the grind, amount of H20, and bean quantity. I will play with the coarseness for the moment.
Damn that machine is loud 😀
True Chris, but in the end the coffee that comes out of it is spectacular.