A few months back, I promised myself that once I got a real tamper (see my previous video), I would be ready to make a new coffee video.  Last week I visited Reg Barber at his shop in Central Saanich, BC, Canada, and he cut a 51mm C-Flat tamper for my Pavoni Professional machine (I severely regret not video taping him doing it), so here I am, delivering on my promise.

As you probably know, the learning curve for a lever machine is quite long.  I have had my Pavoni Pro for over a year now and it has only been in the last few months that I’ve really begun to understand how to use it.  My experience when I bought it was that although there were Pavoni videos out there, but not enough of them were made by experienced owners.  There were some good written resources, however, such as gurus.net and this video was helpful (though the guy talks a lot and over complicates things).  I hope I understand this machine well enough now to make a useful contribution!

I pull a shot of espresso into a clear shot glass.  I use a Rancilio Rocky grinder and the coffee is the Causeway Blend from Caffe Fantastico.  The music I used is performed by a Chilean group called Los Melódicos: Orlando Patiño, Jorge Segura, Leoncio Hidalgo.  I hope they appreciate the exposure.

A couple more notes on extraction time.  As you can see, that was a 35 second shot, but the first lifting would have been about 20-25 seconds.  I have not been able to lift the lever twice and stay within the right amount of time, and I am beginning to think that the machine was not designed for that.  I can estimate the volume of the compressed coffee by assuming it is 1.5cm thick.  Using (height)x(surface area of end), I can calculate the volume of the coffee puck as {tex}1.5\pi(5.1/2)^2 \text{cm}^2 = 30.6\text{cm}^2{/tex}.  In a 58mm puck, this works out to {tex}39.6 \text{cm}^2{/tex} which is about 33% more coffee.  I’m inclined to say that the Pavoni is meant to make long single shots, and that if you lift up twice, the second pull should should be brief or cut off.