Amanda and I have had a Bialetti Brikka espresso pot for quite a while now — it’s much cheaper (and smaller) than a full-fledged espresso maker, and the coffee tastes great. For the first few months, though, we weren’t getting as much espresso out of it as we’d expected, and what was being produced tasted burnt — so we did some experimentation and came up with the following tips:
- Use medium-grind coffee, not fine-grind. We’ve tried both the Illy fine-grind and medium-grind, and discovered that the fine grind tends to cause burnt-tasting coffee. (Apparently Illy makes a coarser Moka grind that we’ll have to try.)
- Don’t tamp the coffee down. Spoon coffee grounds into the cup and leave them alone — don’t overfill, and don’t compress the grounds to fit more in.
- Turn the heat up high enough. We turn the heat up about 2/3 of the way — a little higher than medium heat.
Essentially you want the water to boil and move through the coffee grounds quickly… the burnt flavor occurs when the water has heated and steeped in the grounds but can’t escape into the upper pot quickly enough. Lower heat means it takes more time to get the water up to the right pressure… compressed grounds prevent the water from moving up through the coffee easily.
As we were experimenting with our Brikka, I happened across Bialetti’s own tips for using the Brikka, which echo everything we discovered on our own. Hope this helps!
5 Comments
This is funny. This past week I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the Brikka. Your post basically sums up my findings as well. Not compressing the coffee is key, as is heat. The manual says medium heat, which I took to be 5 on the typically 1-10 scale on most ranges. Not so – now I set it to 8. I didn’t really notice the grind making a huge difference. Nor the water level either – I just fill the plastic measuring cup to the top and call it good.
The grind absolutely makes the difference because of surface area available for coffee extraction, and because it affects how long it take the water to flow through the grounds. (The finer, the longer it takes).
This is true, even for coffee pots. Just ask a barista to grind some for you some time. They’ll ask what type of filter you use- cone, flat, etc- and grind accordingly.
Glad to see another caffeine problem solved :-)
Yeah, I likened the grind issue to the difference between pebbles and sand — one has more empty space through which the water can flow.
I bought a Brikka, but my glass cheramic stove is of the either-on-or-off kind, so setting “2/3rds” on that just means that the heat is on full 2/3 of the time, and off 1/3 of the time.. I’m still experimenting with how to use it properly, but I think the key is heating at a low heat for a while, to heat up the pot (so the upper part is warm as well), and then turning it to full when the funnel starts to fill, to complete the brewing as quickly as possible…
But I haven’t actually owned the pot long enough to have consistent trial and error results. This morning’s coffee, for instance, didn’t have much crema, but the taste was quite good. Maybe it’s just a matter of getting some more experience with it.
Our stove is the same kind — the electric element cycles on and off in a sort of pulse-width-modulation scheme. I’ve found that letting the burner preheat while I fill the Brikka seems to help things… the less time the Brikka spends on the burner, the better, apparently.