This post was originally posted on r/espresso in 2020. I’m manually moving my content here before probably nuking my reddit account. Fuck that little pigboy u/spez.
For years, I struggled with my espresso machine (Lelit PL41TEM) ever since I got a naked portafilter. I tried everything, and I thing I learned a lot and tremendously improved my skills doing so: Weighing coffee, weighing shots, timing pulls, WDT, stockfleth, nutating tamp, NSEW tamp, playing with dose, grind, temperature, bean freshness...
I had good shots, terrible shots, and once in a blue moon excellent shots. But I never achieved consistency. I always struggled with channeling, even with super fresh beans.
The single element that I couldn't control was the pressure. My machine was factory set at 13bars blind and I could only brew decent shots at 11 bars.
Thanks to this video featuring my exact machine and a few pushes from people here, I adjusted my OPV to 10 bars blind, 9 bars brewing. This has been a game changer. I still pull meh shots, but my constitency is now through the roof, and even "bad" shots are actually okay.
