aliexpress Machine
Making Espresso with AliExpress coffee tools #espresso #aliexpress
can you make good coffee with stuff bought from AliExpress that’s the question I’m going to answer today so stick around to the end and we’ll actually make some espresso you might have noticed not everything was bought from AliExpress so let’s just get rid of the stuff that wasn’t bought from AliExpress uh [Music] so in any coffee making Endeavor the first thing you’re going to need is coffee beans right and I’ve got some delicious coffee beans here these coffee beans came from a lovely little Roastery down south of Ireland called Velo they were roasted about three weeks ago so they’re still quite fresh and well this container keeps them fresh for as long as possible the way it works is it’s got a little valve so you press in that will escape all of the air that’s inside and then when you want to open it you just go makes a great noise so this will keep your coffee beans fresh for as long as possible the problem with coffee beans is the more CO2 that gets into them the the worse they’re going to get so we can get this from AliExpress didn’t come that much I’ll put links for everything down in the description so that’s number one right making coffee you need coffee beans you need to keep your coffee beans as fresh as possible the next thing once you have your coffee beans is well we need to get them into some form or another that’s going to allow us to actually make coffee so the next thing is we come to our grinder again I got this from AliExpress there’s a fly in the room no it’s no secret that coffee grinders are really expensive right and I am not at the point of my coffee Journey yet to spend thousands on a coffee grinder so I picked this guy up now it looks probably not like it used to look like when it came out of the box and that’s because I’ve done a few little tweaks to it the first thing you’ll probably notice is there is a Bellows on the top and what it would have come with was originally a big large hopper for 250 grams of beans but as we know I’m keeping my beans in this little guy so no need to keep them in the hopper so I got a single dose Hopper with a Bellows and I got a little wooden thing at the top and a little wooden thing down here would you believe these are actually coasters I got coasters that fit exactly onto the grinder of course you’ve got your little dosing cup and what I’ve actually done is made this magnetic little magnet under the coaster a little magnetic sticker on the bottom of the dosing cup and there you go the dial isn’t standard either the dial used to be this inner silver bit and what I’ve done is taking a dosing ring a 58 mil dosing ring and put it on the top and then the center piece here the black part is actually the center sticker for a wheel of a car the next thing you’re going to need once you’ve ground your coffee is to put that coffee somewhere so that the water can flow through it and that’s where porcer filters come in these are both bottomless Port filters in essence they are exactly the same except that this one just has the two spouts at the bottom of it here this one is your naked portafilter so we put our coffee in here now you might ask why why you not use the standard one that came with the machine if we saw earlier I’ve got the DeLonghi dedica why not use the standard portafilter that came with that couple of reasons number one the standard portafilter that comes with most entry-level coffee machines is something called a pressurized basket and that means that between putting your coffee in and the coffee coming out there is a gap and that Gap creates a lot of pressure and once the coffee is pushed through it it gives you that lovely Crema the stuff that we all want right now what’s different about these is they’re not pressurized which means that you have to create that pressure in a different way we create it with the coffee Puck so to create pressure number one we need to get our dial size correct so our coffee beans have been ground down as finely as our baskets allow and number two the pressure in which you Tamp down the more pressure obviously we’re going to give you a denser puck so there’s a little bit of playing around and this is what you’d call dialing in when especially when it comes to grinding so we’ve gotten to the point maybe that we’ve got our coffee now in our portafilter what we’re going to need to do is make sure that it’s not all clumpy we don’t want we don’t like clumps clumps are not good for coffee think about it this way you want the water to flow through it as evenly as possible right so a tool that we have here wdt tool is essentially acupuncture needles and we use that to de-clump all of the coffee beans once you’re done with your wdt you can use a distributor this just sort of sits on top and you give it a few spins and you’ll see in the way that it’s designed that it’s designed to push the coffee outwards in an even manner once you’re done with your distributor then of course you’re going to use your tamper there are millions of different tampers out there this one is Believe It or Not A makeshift one that I made from a piece of a yellow pear tree that I’d found at home and well essentially you just press down on top of your coffee as evenly as possible you don’t want to Tamp one side more than the other of course but don’t hurt yourself right this isn’t a competition of how strong you are it’s just making sure that there’s an even base across the coffee puck now you’re probably wondering there’s a few extra bits on the table here that I haven’t explained yet so we’ll go through those this is a well it’s a water spray bottle what we use this for is spraying onto your beans before you put them into the grinder that’s going to reduce static buildup inside the grinder if I just give you a quick overview of this what you’ll see here is I actually have two cables coming out of the back of it so what I’ve done here is I’ve attached just a simple copper wire to the body which is metal and that is attached to a plug but it’s only attached to the ground wire so I’ll plug that into the mains and it reduces an awful lot of static and that is equally what this little fellow is for another question you might have is how many coffee beans do I need to put in the grinder well that’s what we have this little fellow for this is the scales and it was again bought from AliExpress and well it’s very small it’s very nice I do have a bigger one somewhere as well but this one’s great for traveling and it’s great to use uh when you’re on the go these baskets are kind of rated somewhere around the 16 gram Mark and what you do is you’ll have a little thing to put your coffee beans into and then you’d weigh out the coffee beans tear it out weigh out your coffee beans before you pop the coffee beans into the grinder give them a little Spritz pop them in and then that’s your grinding process what are these things you might ask well this is again just a piece of mahogany that I found lying around at home which I use as a base this is a dosing ring goes on here so once you’ve got your coffee beans in when you’re doing your wdt you’ve got a little bit of a higher wall at the side or a funnel so it allows you to not make a mess and then we have this fellow which is a Vietnamese fiend and I wanted to include this because the question of today’s video is can you make good coffee with stuff from AliExpress which probably means you’re on a budget just like me this was about six euros and it makes some of the nicest coffee I’ve ever had the way it works is you take the lid off there is a little screw thing in here which you can take out and you pop your ground coffee beans in here you put this back in and then you fill it up with water now this uses gravity to do all of its extracting so probably seven or eight minutes it usually takes for a full cup to come out of this it’ll start dripping slowly slowly and get faster and faster and you end up with one of the most delicious coffees I’ve ever had you drip it over some condensed milk it gives it that nice sweet milky texture to it and it is very very delicious but you can pick one of these up for about six or seven euros okay so let’s actually do it let’s let’s make some coffee shall we let’s begin I’m gonna work through my typical workflow as I normally would except that I’m sort of here in the middle of a table in the kitchen which is what it is um let’s start off with getting our coffee beans out so I’m going to put my little vessel on the top of my scales I’m going to tear it out and then I’m just going to add in 16 grams of coffee beans that’s too much that’s 17.8 so we’re going to take some back maybe two more one more 16. what I’m going to do now is I’m going to come over here with my little spritzy and give it two little sprays you don’t need to go crazy on the sprays it’s just to get a little bit of water onto all of the beans give them a shake and I’m going to pop them in so when you get to the end we can give it a little just to make sure we’ve got everything and so good so what we’ll do now with our ground coffee beans is of course put it into our portafilter so these dosing cups they are designed to fit perfectly into the top of your portal filter all right so you can just simply turn it around and then I’ll use my little matte thing here to give it a little tap down and then my coffee beans are now in the portafilter I love that Magnus it’s quite cool so then we use our dosing cup put that over the top and then we’ll get our wdt tool with our little acupuncture needles and just start whisking away right we just whisk and whisk and whisk and the goal here is to make sure that we’re not having any clumps no big clumps of coffee this grinder is very good at not giving me clumpy grounds at the end but we’re going to do it anyway just to be thorough because we are thorough people those coffee nerds so start from the bottom and work your way back up towards the surface of your coffee and by the end of it it should look lovely and cloudy so at that point I’m just going to give it a little tap down take off our dosing ring and I’m going to get my distributor now this should just slide on the top and then just give it a few turns [Music] so at this stage your coffee is going to look pretty flat and pretty even and yeah it looks good but we can go one step further and that is tamping so like I mentioned earlier these are bottomless portal filters right and we need to create the pressure so that’s why we are tamping down to about 30 pounds of force give or take you don’t need to hurt yourself please don’t go too hard and it’s quite difficult to Tamp from this direction but this is roughly your correct posture right so you want your elbow right above your wrist so you’re not going to do any damage to your wrist you can give it a little spin if you want and once you’re done you’ll now have a perfectly compacted puck so at this point well we’re almost ready to make some coffee so we’ll insert it into our machine it’s very strange doing it from this angle normally I’m facing the coffee machine and well we’ll need a cup I suppose so we’ve got some espresso cups here now before I make this coffee I should explain that I’ve already dialed in the time for this espresso machine so it’s going to give me out about 40 grams of yield in around 30 35 seconds so I’ve kind of already dialed that in by using my scale by using the programmable buttons here typically what we’re looking at is around the 30 second 35 second Mark for about 40 grams of coffee and that’s your double espresso all right here we go [Music] and coffee is happening so it should typically start off in kind of a little dribbles and then it should get to more of a constant flow smells damn good too so I’m just gonna pop this little bowl under here because that’s all of the liquid that we want now and well cheers so now I want to hear from you guys I want to know are you going to go with this setup are you going to go with something different what I’ll do is I’ll leave all the links to the stuff that I’ve used here in the description below I might even do a video on the Vietnamese fiend and what I probably will do is do a complete video on this grinder and what I’ve done to it because it’s not just superficial stuff that I’ve done there’s a lot of calibration and Burr settings that I had to change as well to get it to grind fine enough for espresso but for now what I’ll do is I will say cheers and I’ll see you in the next video
