Coffee Appreciation

Fairy nuff. I'd probably get this
https://www.origincoffee.co.uk/products/airscape

The thing that worked the best for me was portioning it out into smaller amounts in sealable sandwich bags, then bunging them in the freezer, and then just have the current portion in a sealable plastic container. Seems to keep the beans fresh for a lot longer without the need for anything fancy.

Got gifted a bag from them for Christmas- never seen coffee so black and oily before, also a weird and off putting vegetable / earthy smell, very bitter and I’m usually a fan of darker roasts !

The steam wand on my sage barista pro has gone kaput. The steam kind of wafts out of the drip tray and it makes a noise that’s not quite the usual pulsing. Local repair guy won’t say what the fault is, just that it’ll cost £170 to repair. Anyone else experienced this before? Is that a reasonable fee to pay?

Deffo not blocked at the nozzle or need a descale?

The nozzle holes look clear, all 4 of them. I'll get it off when I get home and double check though. It's been descaled regularly as soon as the warning has come on. It's two years old and Bristol has pretty hard water so maybe it's time to get it serviced. The guy charges £40 for a service so I guess I could ask him to service it first but I guess it's in his interest to push for the £170 repair

Then get a filter system installed.
Running HW through any machine and relying on descaling is a risky habit (if this is what you've been doing).

Do you mean beyond the filter in the water tank for the machine? Like one of those mains water filter things?

Yes, depending on how the machine is fed, is it a tank you fill manually or mains connected?

Yeah it's the tank on the back of the machine, which has a filter in that I change every 3 months. It's not plumbed into the mains

I suppose it depends what the filter is actually filtering. Very hard water requires quite specific filtering to be really good for coffee machines. Might be worth getting a test kit (from BWT or similar) and seeing what goes in Vs what comes out, however I'd prefer to have the water treated before it hits the machine at all.
Some people use mineral waters, some people filter their mains and use that.

You can get Brita filter attachments which just screw on to your cold water feed. That’s improved the quality of our water. Usually filter again in a jug too but that’s not necessary

Might have to look into it. Bristol has hard to very hard water apparently. Anyone stripped down and descaled a steam wand in a Sage machine before?

If I fit an in-line filter like this one would it be good for filter coffee? The website looks hilariously scammy but there’s thousands of good reviews on Trustpilot.

I’m not sure about that one, but a filter that will work well with the ingredients of your mains water will improve the taste everything you use the tap for.

I live in a hard water area too (Bath) and have a Sage machine. Kept getting scale. Turns out that you can double the strength of descale solution you use (this was advised by sage) and with 1-2 monthly descale cycles using citric acid haven’t had any issues for a while now (touch wood).
Are you able to get some sort of steam out through the steam wand? If so you’ll get descale solution through, and then I’d just recommend a couple of descale cycles over a few days with higher concentration descaler as above.

Thanks, I'll definitely up the descaling strength and frequency. I actually unblocked the wand this morning. I'd been a bit casual in unblocking the holes with the little tool thing. It needed a proper going over and it's clear and working fine now. Will descale the shit out of it at the weekend. Cheers

Yeah that’s what I’m hoping, but didn’t want to over-soften the water and make it worse at extracting coffee. I figure it’s got to be better than the Brita filter jug we currently use, which I’m sure is basically tap water after a few weeks of changing the filter.

I'm not sure it's possable to over-soften London water

https://www.brita.com.au/news-stories/consumer/what-is-limescale

This explains things well. Only reverse-osmosis filtering will reduce the mineral content to detrimental levels and those systems for catering use have a bypass to prevent that. Standard Brita type filters work great.

Is it steaming better now then?

Ah great, thanks - I’m always suspicious of reading this stuff from a company like Brita but that’s really helpful.

Ha, good point

Yeah it’s back to normal now thanks

Selling my Sage smart grinder pro [edit: sold to RonnieOatmilk]

bit of a reluctant sale as I was holding onto this so I could have a grinder and my precision brewer in my garden office when it's finished to save constant trips to the kitchen but I've been out of work for a few months and urgently need some money to help cover some bills and don't actually need my office at the moment so this is also surplus for now.

bought in july 23, used once daily to grind large pot worth of filter coffee while i redecorated our new house until it was packed away end of oct 23 when we moved in and i could use our main coffee setup again.

comes with all original accessories, a very cool dark arts sticker and I'll throw in a sage dosing funnel compatible with the sage 54mm portafilter handles for free.

will be sent in original protective packaging (minus all the plastic baggies) inside a cardboard shipping box.

I've emptied the grinder and given it a wipe down but it will have some grounds tucked away in some little nooks but otherwise it's in great condition.

[edit: now sold] asking £140 incl. postage and paypal fees. will send out by RM tracked 48 signed for the day after payment received.

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