5. Advanced coffee making with the professional basket
The basics in section 4 will provide you with a good foundation on how the
machine works, but as with everything, practice makes perfect and so here
are some extra tips on using the professional coffee basket. The Robot is
exactly the same as any high-end coffee machine, for example the advanced
basics would be:
• Use fresh coffee from a local coffee roaster (local so it is fresh)
• Use a decent burr coffee grinder and grind just before you will use it
• The grind setting will roughly be in the same area as your grind setting
for a regular machine
• Start with a 14g dose and work from there
• For best results use the BPF
As you get more familiar with the machine you can then start to take things to
the next level, but before we do let us take a moment to talk about extraction
pressure.
The 9 bar magic number
.
Ignore that number when dealing with a lever machine. In my experience
TLCM rarely extract above 7 bars pressure. The 9 bar pressure has come
from the Faema E61 machine, where the pressure was taken from the water
inlet to the coffee machine, the extraction pressure at the actual group head
was much less, possibly even 1 bar lower. But 9 bars were adopted as the
gold standard.
On the Robot you should be aiming for an extraction pressure of somewhere
between 6-7 bars. Feel free of course to experiment but that is what I have
found works best so far.
Bathroom scales and pressure
For Robots with the Pressure Gauge Kit you can see the extraction pressure.
For regular Robots you can use a set of bathroom scales to test your
pressure. Place the Robot on some bathroom scales and make coffee as
usual – the measurement on the scale may used to convert that value to
pressure exerted inside the basket. Please refer to the table on page 23.
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