Brewing Perfect Espresso at Home: Expert Barista Tips Using the Kenmore Elite
Welcome to our comprehensive guide on brewing the perfect espresso at home! In this blog post, we break down all the essential steps—from dosing and adjusting grind size to mastering milk steaming and latte art—all demonstrated with the Kenmore Elite espresso machine. Based on an insightful video by Ryan at LongshotCoffeeCo, this post provides detailed barista tips and techniques honed over nearly 15 years in the coffee industry. Whether you're a budding home barista or a seasoned coffee enthusiast, you'll find valuable insights to elevate your coffee brewing game. Scroll down to read the full transcript and watch the accompanying video to learn how to create café-quality espresso and milk-based drinks right in your kitchen. Enjoy the journey to your perfect cup!
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Well, hi, hello there! My name's Ryan, and welcome to Longshot. Welcome to The Roastery. Today, I want to show you how to make some really great tasting coffee with the Kenmore Elite.
This espresso machine has tripod. This espresso machine has been on the bar here at The Roastery, and I've also taken the machine home with me too. I've made some really lovely tasting coffee for myself and for my family. The challenging thing is, right—I have been in the coffee industry for nearly 15 years, and there were a few things that I did to get the best out of this machine.
The hard part about brewing coffee is that all beans require their own sort of approach. There are some adjustments that you need to make to the espresso machine to get them to taste really good. That is, by the way, a barista's job description. Their job is to control the espresso machine over the course of the day to get the best results. So, let me share that with you.
Let's get straight into it. The first thing I want to share with you—and the first thing I want to help you with—is brewing great espresso. All of the drinks that we get in a café have espresso as their base. So, we're either going to add some milk to it or add some water. But if the espresso doesn't taste good, then the rest of the drink is not going to be very nice either. So, let's get that espresso tasting great.
The first part about brewing great espresso is getting your dose right—the amount of coffee that you use in the basket. I don't know if this makes sense; I'm sure it will in a second. Okay, check this out. We want to put 20 G of coffee in this basket. That's what we use here at The Roastery in our commercial espresso machine. Twenty grams needs to go into this basket, and we're going to use a set of scales to help us there. If we put our handle on here and tear this to zero, we want the amount of coffee that goes into there to be 20 G. And if there's less—let's say there's like 19 G—we're going to adjust this dial here to change the amount of coffee that goes into the basket. If there's a little bit too much, we can adjust that here. Twenty grams is what we are aiming for. We gotta wait for the beep—wait for the beep because then we know it's finished. There we go, so there we go—all done, looking great.
We're going to put this on the espresso machine just to confirm we've got 19.4 G—that's very, very close, right? Use a set of scales to get the amount of coffee in here to 20 G. That's point number one.
Point number two is how long it takes for our espresso to brew. Now, I have been enjoying a 35-second brew time—that's what I've been enjoying—and we control the brew time with the top of the espresso machine. Here, this dial—we can adjust that to get our brew time to change by changing our grind size. We're going to put this into the Spro machine. I'm going to put our cup underneath it so when I press the button, that's when we start timing our brew process.
If our shot is too fast and the water flows too quickly, it might not taste very good, and so we might need our grind size to be finer. Alternatively, if it brews really, really, really slowly, then our grind size is too fine and we need to make it coarser. So, we're aiming for a 35-second shot—which is just here. That's 30 seconds, 3, 4, 35—hey, bang on, awesome, cool!
So, by controlling the amount of coffee that goes into the basket and then controlling our grind size to get the appropriate brew time, I'm very confident that that espresso is going to be delicious. Let's put some milk in it; let's turn it into a flat white. Most people drink their coffee with a little bit of milk. Let me show you how to make your milk really good.
Okay, the trick is you want to fill the milk jug just below the bottom of this spout—that's what we do in the industry. That's the fill line. If we put too much milk in here, it's going to go everywhere, right? It's going to make a total mess. So, this is the point that we want to fill to.
Next thing we want to do with this machine is purge a little bit of the water out. Water is going to form inside this steam wand, and we don't want that in here—we want that in the tray. So, let's get rid of that water. Yeah, cool, sweet. So now we can start brewing, steaming.
Alright, you'll notice that I have the steam wand off to one side—does that make sense? I don't know if you can see that very well. The steam wand is on the side of the milk jug, and it's spinning the milk around inside the jug. That's going to break up any big bubbles that form. We call this shape the "whirlpool effect." We also want to make sure that the steam wand is only just below the surface. Can—I mean, if I move the microphone, you can probably hear that scratching sound—is the sound of foam being created. We want to get the milk up to the point where it's just too hot to hold because we're going to lose some of that heat to this cup. Cool, there we go.
There we go—always, always clean the steam wand. Always. If you forget and this gets really, like, crusty, vinegar—vinegar is the key. Alright, what we've got—we want to move quickly here with this foam. We've got a really lovely looking foam. Can you see that? We want it to look like wet paint.
Alright, now we pour slowly to start and then pour quickly to form some really nice latte art. Tada, there we go. I'd be pretty happy if I got served that at home. Oh yeah, awesome!
This is the cool thing about the coffee industry. This is the cool thing about being a barista: our job is literally to start people's day. That's what baristas do, and that's pretty cool. So, I think the best part about the coffee industry is not just drinking great tasting coffee for yourself—I mean, that rocks, obviously, who doesn't love drinking great tasting coffee that you made yourself? But the part of the industry that I think people get most obsessed with is the sharing part. We get to share this thing that we've made with other people.
So now that you are, you know, becoming a barista (which is kind of cool—welcome to the club), I feel like what you should go do is go make a coffee for somebody else. Just make a coffee the way that they like it and just give it to them—don't say anything. Watch what happens. Look at the look on their face; it's priceless!
I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope you got a lot out of it. I hope you get some really great tasting coffee at home in your life. Go find Longshot online—Google us, find us on Instagram. We roast coffees that we think taste amazing. We love this industry, we love starting people's day—that's what we do. So, if this video was useful and if you liked it, well then maybe consider buying some coffee off of us. That is our bread and butter. After all, other than that, have fun brewing coffee at home, fellow barista!
