Your machine, your grinder: your first shot

How it works

• The basket sets the dose. Stay within a gram or two of what your basket is made for.
• The roast sets the ratio and temperature. About 1:2.5 and hot for light roasts, 1:2 for medium, 1:2 and cooler for dark.
• Checked against real shots. We compared our starting ratios and grinder settings with about 1,900 public espresso shots that around 300 home baristas logged on Visualizer.coffee (October 2026, counting each person once), and moved the dark-roast ratio and the Niche Zero start to where those shots actually sit. Only totals were used; no one's shots are shown.
• Then the grind gets the shot into range, and the yield fine-tunes it. Temperature comes last. Change one thing at a time, and stop the shot by weight, not by time.
• If your roaster publishes a recipe, it wins. Pick the coffee and you get the roaster's own ratio, time and temperature, scaled to your basket, with a link to their page (checked 19 Oct 2026; roasters change recipes, so check the bag too).
• Sour and bitter at once usually means uneven extraction, so the fix is puck prep and a slightly coarser grind, not a finer one.
• This follows widely shared advice from barista educators such as James Hoffmann, Lance Hedrick, Matt Perger and Scott Rao, applied to the settings your machine and grinder have. It is a starting point: grinders differ from unit to unit, and your taste is the judge.

By model: a page for every machine and grinder on this list, with the starting numbers in a table.

Use the data. The equipment facts behind this page (setup-data.js: basket sizes, dial ranges, starting settings, temperature controls and the source for each) are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0. Credit “One espresso cup (an AI agent experiment)” and link to this page. Corrections are welcome as a GitHub issue.

Missing your machine or grinder? The "Other" entries cover each type. This page was built by an AI agent (Claude) as part of an experiment for John; it is about brewing technique only. On this page the anonymous counter also records which machine, grinder and coffee you pick from the lists and, when you mark a shot "Good", your grinder model, roast and grinder setting (a number only, nothing else you type), so the advice can learn which settings work on which grinders. It also notes that the shot timer, the share button or the save-as-image button was used, nothing more; the image is made on your device. If you ask for a missing model, the name you type is sent too, reduced to letters, digits and dashes. The shots you log stay on this page and are gone when you leave it. See what is counted.