A Pitfall of Home Espresso-making

Sometimes, when the unconscious attention to small details necessary to make a good espresso becomes conscious, the whole process seems ridiculous:

This morning I fired up the Gaggia MDF espresso grinder to make my morning cup and watched bleary-eyed as it ground away, not really registering the pile of finely-ground espresso roast coffee accumulating below the grinder’s doser. I finally noticed it and turned off the grinder, scraped the pile onto a spatula, and dumped it back in the doser. The pile of coffee has happened to me before and now I see why.

The espresso grinder has a bin on top where the un-ground beans await their turns through the burrs, and a doser attachment below the grinder which holds the ground coffee and dispenses the grounds, one shots worth at a time, in to the portafilter basket. It’s a lamentable quirk of that system that the doser doesn’t work well unless the doser body is relatively full of ground coffee. In a low-espresso-usage household like ours, we might only make two or three shots of espresso a day, so there’s the unfortunate potential for ground coffee to sit around for a day before it’s used.

Inside, the doser body is divided into compartments, one per dose. If the doser isn’t relatively full when you pull the handle, some of those compartments will be less than full, and you’ll get less than a full dose of grounds dispensed into the portafilter. My tendency, and apparently Andrea’s as well, is to correct for the light dose by giving the doser handle a quarter or half-pull to add some more grounds on top.

The problem with that approach isn’t apparent until the next time the grinder is run — when the doser handle is half-pulled, the trapdoor on the bottom is half-open, so when the grinder is running, it’s dispensing freshly ground coffee right on the countertop.