Coffee Data Science
Blooming Espresso Profile Explorations
A side quest in trying to improve Pump & Dump
Blooming profiles for espresso have been the more common advanced profile in the past 5 or 6 years. They are easy to understand and modify, and most of my profiles use the concept. A typical blooming profile does pre-infusion, pauses flow for some period of time, and continues with an infusion step.
I started exploring this blooming profile on the Decent Espresso machine using coffee that was 3 months post roast. This coffee is more consistent in being degassed, so I ran some experiments.
Blooming
This is a typical profile.
Bloom First?
I wanted to look at a few things. What if I put a bloom first? Could the bloom first help with any thermal issues?
No, it didn’t help. The 113C test is from my Pump & Dump profile as a reference.
Blooming Ramp
What about changing the pre-infusion from a straight edge to a ramp? Instead of ramping to 4 bars, what if you ramped flow until 4 bars was hit?
This did have an immediate improvement in extraction yield!
I tried changing the bloom from 0 ml/s to 0.1 ml/s as well as a few variants, but they made the shot worse.
I looked at a long ramp instead of a bloom since so much of the shot can come through on the ramp without moving to the bloom phase.
Changes to the Pump & Dump
These tests convinced me to change a few things. This is what my profile originally looked like.
I changed my pause flow rate from 0.5 ml/s to 0.1 ml/s, which gave a great improvement.
I also tried a long ramp, but that didn’t improve things.
I really enjoy running these tests because just when I think my profile is done and finished, I start experimenting and finding more improvements.
I also encourage anyone using a blooming profile to change to a blooming ramp profile.
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