Beginner Home Barista Collection

Chocolate Brownie Blend - A stonking rich, bold & chocolatey blend - very forgiving for espresso, and perfect for milkies! More Info

Chocolate Fondant Blend - Bold, punchy with deep luxurious slightly toasty chocolate notes, this is one you have to try! More Info

Fruitcake Blend - A delicious spicy & fruity coffee, reminiscent of Christmas cake, easy to dial in for espresso. More Info

Fruit & Nut Blend - Lovely, enjoyable & easy drinking blend of two speciality single origins, fruit & nut heaven! More Info

How to Use the Beginner Home Barista Collection

Obviously you can use these beans however you like, but if you're using them while starting to hone your home barista skills, here's a tip for how to get the best from them. 

Firstly, you'll notice the roasted on date is either the day of dispatch or in some cases the day before, so depending on how good a job the postie did, the beans will usually be somewhere between 2-5 days from roast date. 

Ideally, it's good to use the first bag around 5-7 days from the roast date, so if you can wait a few days from receiving them to starting to use them, that's great. 

If you can't wait, it's no problem, just keep in mind that beans are changing more within this time, so you'll generally get better results from around a week onwards after roast date, and ideally within four weeks, but don't worry if you're not used all your beans within four weeks, they don't suddenly go stale at that point.

I'd recommend starting out with either chocolate brownie blend, or chocolate fondant blend. These are the most forgiving of the four for dialling in, so they're what I'd recommend starting out with. 

Fruit and nut blend is a blend of two speciality Arabicas, and they're roasted just a tad lighter than the others, so they're just a bit more of a challenge, and they're perfect for the last bag to be used from the box, after you've cut your teeth on the other three. 

Generally speaking, you'll find that you'll need to take your grind size finer as you work your way from chocolate fondant blend, through to fruit and nut blend, and that the biggest adjustment will come when cracking open the fruit and nut. 

If your machine has adjustable brew temperature, you may find that while the standard temp is fine for the first three, knocking your machine up by one or two degrees may make things a bit easier for dialling in with fruit and nut.

The best approach to beginning to dial in is to see ratio and grind size as your two main variables to adjust, and to leave everything else the same, most of the time. Although, if your machine has adjustable brew temperature, keep in mind that when you're making quite a big jump in roast profile, a change in brew temp may be very useful.

Ratio is the relationship between the dose weight and the amount of espresso, so pulling a bigger shot with the same dose, increases the ratio. 

If you're getting unwanted, unpleasant acidity in the shot, this is the taste of under extraction, so you need to extract more.

If you just pull a bigger shot with the same dose, you'll extract more, and that's simple, however when you do this you're increasing the extraction but also you're reducing the intensity and the body. 

This is why we'd usually focus mainly on adjusting the grind finer in order to extract more, so that we don't sacrifice intensity or mouthfeel, but also an increased brew temperature will lead to a greater extraction. 

Up to a certain point, you can get away with sacrificing a small amount of intensity and body without an overall detriment to the cup quality, so most of the time, especially with more entry level grinders or integrated grinder machines, using ratio in addition to grind size, is a great approach. 

An example of how I'd go about this, is that I'd start out by anticipating a required grind size adjustment based on the next coffee I'm using (this comes with practice), and I'd pull a shot at around a 1:2 ratio, for example about 40ml of espresso from about 18g of coffee.

I'd then be led in part by the numbers (shot time) but mainly by taste, and I'll then change one thing at a time, either the ratio or the grind size, until I think I've nailed the balance. 

If this approach doesn't seem to be working, sometimes I'll make an adjustment to the brew temperature, if I'm using a machine with adjustable temp, although (again this comes with experience) I'll often start out by making a temp adjustment if I know the beans I've just opened are quite a bit different.