Crema Dilemma

"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons."

-T. S. Eliot

A better day yesterday. A midday nine-hole jaunt around the Corning Country Club took every bit of one hour and twenty-two minutes--basically a long lunch break. It also broke up the day into two manageable four-hour segments.

And a missing piece of certified mail containing a large check showed up, twenty days after it was mailed. I was sweating bullets. It seems like a data point to document a federal government that is falling apart before our eyes.

This morning I started trying to address an issue that may be related to the senescence of our espresso machine.

When we returned from Manhattan, both P and I were excited to brew up our first double espresso latte after four months of my almost undrinkable drip coffee. But when I pulled the first shot for Peg's morning brew, I noticed there was no crema, the pale froth on top of the shot created by the oil in the beans and the pressure of forcing hot water through the portafilter.

What was going on here? The beans were the same as we've been using for years now, and only a couple weeks old. The machine, however, seemed to be struggling to deliver the needed pressure. When one pulls a shot, the needle on the left should wiggle a little, then drop from the blue to the green as the pressure builds. Here, it was hanging around in the blue.

So I looked up Clive Coffee's discussion board on the topic, and learned that it could be old beans (no), the volume and fineness of the grind (maybe), or a failing pump (geez, I hope not).

Being a bad scientist, I introduced two variables at once, rendering it impossible to tell what caused any change. I upped the grind time by a half-second to more fully fill the portafilter, and I swapped the order of shooting a little hot water into the cup then pulling the shot, instead pulling the shot first. Sure enough, the needle dropped right into the green, and the crema returned.

I'll tinker with it some more over the next few days, hoping it's not in fact the pump. Maybe there's some sort of espresso maker cialis for an old machine that doesn't deliver like it used to.