#pressure profiling

Recently discovered the Ambient Espresso Vesuvius Dual Boiler Espresso Machine, which is one of two of the single-group machines that can do electronic pressure profiling. The other one is the Rocket Espresso R 60V, which has not yet reached the American market.

In my opinion, pressure profiling is an absolute necessity when pulling single origin espresso shots, which I consider to be the apex of espresso brewing.  While the E61 manual lever, spring loaded manual lever, and the newer manual paddles can do on the fly barista controlled pressure profiling, it is difficult to achieve great results and even more difficult to repeat them. This is why electronic pressure profiling is needed, at home or at the coffeehouse.

Until the Vesuvius and R 60V, electronic pressure profiling was limited to the higher end Slayer, La Marzocco, and Synesso machines. With the new Ambient and Rocket espresso machines small shop and home baristas now have access to this technology and can start pulling better SO Espresso shots.

Pre-Infusion Video

Here is a video on Pre-Infusion that gives a little history on the different methods for achieving this. The oldest methods is in the manual lever machines and the E61 groupheads and the newest methods are achieve by way of gradual pump pressure increase in manual paddle machines like the LM Strada MP.

Although the video does not cover this much, I would add that the LM EP and Modbar are pushing the quality of pre-infusion even further by allowing programmable profiling, including different ways to ramp up and down the pressure.  

There is wide range of opinions on which method of pre-infusion is best and what is the best practice terms of amount of pressure and the duration of the pre-infusion. In the end, however, it is universally accepted that pressure profiling single origin espresso and higher quality espresso blends draws out more of the nuanced flavors.