This is part two of my thoughts about the Morning coffee machine.
What is a good espresso? That depends on who you ask. What tastes fine for someone might be awful for someone else. There is really no correct espresso, and an espresso that conforms to the technical specifications could taste terrible if the beans weren’t grown or roasted properly. The article “What “true” espresso is, and how Americans ruin it” is a good articulation of the situation.
The particle size the beans are ground to, the temperature of the water that is sent through the ground coffee, the pressure the water is pushed through the ground coffee, the amount of liquid that is pushed through the ground coffee, and quality of the water, and the quality of the coffee machine that is used to control all these elements are all relevant in how the espresso tastes. This is where the Morning coffee machine changes the game.
The Morning machine has 3 game-changing features: PID temperature control; variable pump pressure; and a built-in digital scale and flow meter. This is explained in their video. What these features allow for the first time in a Pod machine is the ability to control and vary these elements when making an espresso. A roaster can recommend settings, or a “brew recipe”, but the user can vary it to adjust the taste. Drop the temperature of the water a couple of degrees, reduce or increase the amount of espresso by 10–20 grams, increase the pressure a tad. You get the picture.
The outcome of this is that I’ve been able to get a consistently tasty “long black” from a Pod that doesn’t taste like burnt tar. In technical terms, I’m getting 100g of coffee from a Pod that I hadn’t been able to achieve with a Nespresso branded machine. With a traditional Nespresso machine I previously used two Pods to make two 25ml drinks and I added 50ml of hot water to get a 100ml cup of coffee. My hypothesis is that the machine uses a pump that is set at a specific pressure, uses an unsophisticated thermometer that controls the heating of the water, and a timer that turns off the pump regardless of how much water has flowed through the Pod. That’s why a short 20–25ml of espresso has a good chance of tasting nice (for me), but a long 60–80ml of espresso has very little chance as the machine is just pumping a continual stream of water at an uncontrolled temperature and pressure. Baristas would call this over-extracted espresso.
The Morning coffee machine allows the user to set the temperature of the water. It also allows you to adjust the pump pressure three times during an extraction. And it allows you to specify how much output you want measured by weight in grams. The latter is one of the modern techniques to obtain consistency because espresso liquid is a different density to espresso crema resulting in different weight. This means that an espresso with a lot of crema will appear to be higher up in the cup than an espresso with less crema. But both will have the same weight. The Morning coffee machine will stop the extraction when a particular weight of espresso has been extracted.
When I started making espresso, I was obsessed with making sure the espresso was extracted within the time parameters and the volume of liquid was also correct. Taste was only relevant AFTER these technical elements were correct. Today, taste is the only element. With the Morning coffee machine, I can focus on making adjustments to the temperature and pressure profile until my cup of coffee tastes good.
My machine has now made over 100 coffees. I’ve tried pods from Nespresso, Karon Farm, and Talk Coffee. The Nespresso pods were Ethiopia and Colombia from their Master Origins category and Tokyo Vivalto Lungo from their World Explorations category. The Karon Farm coffees were Morning Habit, Mount Buninyong Blend, and Lal Lal Falls Blend. The Talk Coffee was their Shed Shandy. The pods from Karon Farm and Talk Coffee used compostable pods whereas the Nespresso ones can be recycled if you take them to a recycling location.
With these seven coffees, I can say that I’ve been able to get enjoyable espresso ranging from 25g to 100g with six of the coffees. Only the Nespresso Tokyo Vivalto eluded my attempts to get a brew recipe that gave me a coffee to my taste. The fact that the Morning coffee machine could be adjusted to deliver enjoyable coffee from 25g-100g from the same Pod is truly ground breaking in my mind. This control means the Morning coffee machine can give the owner delicious coffee from many different roasters if they wanted to explore the world of coffee or just settle with a single coffee and get a consistent brew time and time again.
In the next and final part of this review I’ll delve into the machine’s abilituy to customise brew profiles.
