Coffee Equipment Walkthrough

Transcript

Trainer: When it comes to steaming our milk, a really great tool is a thermometer. When you’re first starting out, it can be really hard to know the temperature of the milk. As a seasoned barista, I will go by feel. I’ll wait until it feels too hot to hold onto for a second, but your best bet is to always have a thermometer to make sure it’s at that perfect temperature. For coffees, it’s better to have it around the 60 to 65 Fahrenheit or 140 to 160 Celsius. That is where it’s recommended. Anything over that, you can end up burning the milk, and it will be not a very great flavor, or it just won’t really be hot enough to drink.

From there, we have all of the parts of the espresso machine. This here is our steam wand. This is how you start it. Ours is a turn. Some will have a lever, some will be a little bit different, but they all do the same thing. On the very top of our machine, you will see this grate here. This is what helps keep our mugs warm. If you are serving coffee and your mugs are not warm, they can cool off very easily just because of them being cold and the hot liquid. The porcelain doesn’t hold the heat as well when the cups are cold. So, cups stay here to stay warm.

Right here, we have our group head and our portafilter. This is what our coffee grounds will go into to make our coffees. I just made a coffee with this one here. As you can see, this is our espresso, and this is our single shot and our double shot here. I will click the single shot just to rinse out the grinds that are in there.

Then from there, this is my knock box here. This is where I will put all of the espresso grounds that I’ve already used into here to discard them.

My grinder is here. For this side, this is how you would change the grind to finer, and this is how you would change it to more coarse. If your espresso is running very fast, it will need to have a finer grind so that it’s less water running through. If yours are running very slow, then you’ll want it to be a more coarse grind so that it’s easier for the water to run through.

Right here, this is where we tamp our espresso. This is the tamp here, and we always want to make sure that we’re tamping down here and not up here to make sure that we’re not bending these.

From there, we’ll also have our milk jugs to steam with, and we’ll use this as well to just clean up any grounds that are in and around. This machine as well has a hot water spout, so if we were doing a long black or a chai latte, anything of the sorts, we can press that and get some nice hot water.

Some different cup sizes we have here. We have a large size and the regular size. Some cafes might have one that’s a little bit smaller. This one is also known as a tulip. You might get asked for a tulip flat white. This is what they would be referring to.

There’s multiple different coffees that you can make. You can make a long black, which is just espresso and water, or you can make a flat white, which is espresso and milk, just steamed slightly so it’s flat, a little more microfoam, less foam. You also have a latte, which will be espresso, milk, and foam. And a cappuccino, which will be espresso, milk, and lots of foam. Some places as well will do a cappuccino with some chocolate on the top to make them extra special.

Some other coffees that you might encounter might be an Americano, which is very similar to a long black. It is just espresso with hot water poured on top, versus a long black having this espresso poured on top of the hot water. We also have our mochas, our hot chocolates. Our mochas are really just a latte with some chocolate added into there, and our hot chocolate is just a latte without the coffee added into there. And when we do our chais, typically, depending on if you’re using a syrup or a powder, if we’re using a powder, I’ll mix in a little bit of hot water, and then I’ll add my steamed milk and top it with some cinnamon