ES1 Post-Shot Puck
I've pulled some shots within the 25-35 second range without any channeling/spraying but the shots are still on the sour side and I'm not getting any sort of sweetness. What's consistent about these shots is that the pucks are always soft/muddy. I'm also seeing an indentation in the middle of the puck and a varying amount of small crater-like shapes on the outer edges. With my previous machine, when I'm dialed-in, or close to it, my pucks come out pretty firm and easily release from the basket. This is why the pucks coming out of the ES1 are raising a red flag to me.
I'm pretty confident about my prep given that I'm not seeing any spraying. I'm using a WDT tool, a distributor, and a self-leveling tamper.
I'm open to suggestions but I'm mainly curious to see if anyone else is having the same experience. For additional context, I've pulled most of my shots using the classic 9 bar profile with a manual stop (weighing my output). After noticing that the profile overshoots to 10 bars, I thought that could be causing the indentation in the center of the puck so I duplicated the profile and changed it to 8 bars. That didn't get rid of the issue. I then realized that the profile doesn't have a pre-infusion step, so I added that to my 8 bar profile in hopes that it could result in a more even distribution and a firmer puck. That didn't work either and I'm out of ideas.
I don't have any photos, or the energy to pull more shots today, but I can share some tomorrow if anyone's interested 😄