Hi Friends,

It's Sunday night and I'm exhausted. But let's look back and find a couple things I'm happy I was able to do this week.

Calibrating the Espresso Machine

When I first got my espresso machine (A Breville Barista Express), I didn't know about puck preparation. I would just grind the beans and then straight away tamp them down. This meant I had to use a crazy amount of pressure to get enough pressure during the pull.

I thought this was because the grind size was too big, and so I learned how to adjust the burr setting to produce a finer grind. This worked ok for some time. Then I learned about puck prep, and it turns out if you do that properly then you don't have to use a lot of pressure to get a good pull.

The problem then became that the grind size was way too fine, and if I applied any pressure at all, then the shot wouldn't pull well. The water could barely squeeze through the puck.

The solution was to reset the burr setting to produce a coarser grind, and this in combination with doing the right puck preparation is now producing really great espresso shots.

Having the machine and my process working smoothly makes it so much more fun to use the machine 🙂 ☕️

Sunday Run

For the past month I've been making it a point to do a long run every Sunday. I go to the gym and run for an hour on the treadmill, listening either to music or a podcast or a course on YouTube. I view it as sort of a cleanse and a reset, mentally and physically. I love sweating a lot. I love the feeling of hitting my stride a few miles into the run, increasing my speed and making my body work.

The first 2-3 weeks (I forget exactly when I started) I ran 6 miles. Today I upped my speed a little earlier than normal and finished with 6.5 🙂 🏃

I'm going to leave it here for this week. Like I said, it's getting late and I'm exhausted.

Stay safe and see you next week ❤️