Community espresso profile

Clever Lever (Automatic Pro v3)

by modsmthng

Experimental profile that uses the new weight, or rather water-pumped, ramp style. To determine the range in which the transition takes place, I analyzed the main extraction phase of the Spring Lever variant of Automatic Pro and used the average “pumped water” value for the ramp-down. The profile therefore works without a scale and should also work better with coarser-ground coffee than the weight-based ramp-down style. Explanation of the difference: The ramp down happens via a weight or water drawn goal instead of time Clever Lever is a direct remix of the Spring Lever variant, so it’s a pressure-based extraction. With the Spring Lever variant (or lever profiles in general that work with declining pressure, such as Cremina Lever), there’s a problem: if you grind too coarse or too fine, you never quite hit the optimal ramp-down timing, since until now the ramp duration could only be defined by time. Automatic Pro already helped compensate for this somewhat with the adaptive pre-infusion phase and by checking the pressure after the start of the main extraction, but it could still happen that the lever effect was barely noticeable because the grind size wasn’t right. With the new feature, the ramp time can now be replaced with a weight or water-drawn target. This means that instead of having a duration of, say, 20 seconds, the ramp happens over a pumped water volume of 30 ml (or 40g). This gives you the same ramp effect regardless of time, the ramp length is adaptively stretched or shortened depending on the flow-through time. This introduces a new issue, though: the weight or water-drawn amount would need to be adjusted according to the dose or ratio. My conclusion is still that the ramp-down style based on the water-pumped value feels significantly better than using time, because it adds another mechanism that compensates for a less-than-optimal grind size. So it fits perfectly into the Automatic Pro concept. Note: This is also an interesting option for flow profiles, since you would then have two variables that relate to puck resistance. I’ll be testing that as well.