# Weight based shot control on a Rancilio Silvia



## Doram (Oct 12, 2012)

Just saw this super-cool mod for the Silvia: Weight based shot control -

https://www.coffeeforums.co.uk/index.php?app=core&module=system&controller=embed&url=https://www.reddit.com/r/espresso/comments/j5tbaq/weight_based_shot_control_on_a_rancilio_silvia_im/


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## shadow745 (Apr 29, 2012)

Typical number chasing newbies... for absolute maximum results I always go by taste, texture, color, flow rate, etc. and consistency is quite easy to obtain with any coffee on any machine/grinder when you know what you're looking at/expecting.


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## Mrboots2u (May 10, 2013)

shadow745 said:


> Typical number chasing newbies... for absolute maximum results I always go by taste, texture, color, flow rate, etc. and consistency is quite easy to obtain with any coffee on any machine/grinder when you know what you're looking at/expecting.


 Brilliant tell, what those are and how he can achieve them then .

what texture does Is best for maximum results .


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## facboy (Dec 13, 2019)

Mrboots2u said:


> Brilliant tell, what those are and how he can achieve them then .
> 
> what texture does Is best for maximum results .


 i find crushed velvet best, but my wife prefers P2000 sandpaper. each to their own i guess.


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## shadow745 (Apr 29, 2012)

Thing is people get so caught up chasing numbers they usually piss away a lot of time, coffee, etc. Like some on many forums just go on and on about how a scale 'must' be used to weigh output to be consistent. I'll call total B.S. on that any day and gladly prove it any way possible. The newbies end up listening to that sort of thing and think they have it wrong if the numbers don't match. Only variable I have ever gone by is the dry dose for every extraction. Other than that it's skill, patience and the determination to GSD and it works great for me.


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## Rob1 (Apr 9, 2015)

shadow745 said:


> Thing is people get so caught up chasing numbers they usually piss away a lot of time, coffee, etc. Like some on many forums just go on and on about how a scale 'must' be used to weigh output to be consistent. I'll call total B.S. on that any day and gladly prove it any way possible. The newbies end up listening to that sort of thing and think they have it wrong if the numbers don't match. Only variable I have ever gone by is the dry dose for every extraction. Other than that it's skill, patience and the determination to GSD and it works great for me.


 How would you define consistency if not weight in, weight out, and time? Measuring volume out is another option. Eyeballing would be imprecise but consistently imprecise. It's bad advice to chase numbers as there isn't a magic number that will make good coffee but it is useful as a measure and it's useful to set a parameter so other changes are meaningful (e.g grind size alteration). If you want to measure extraction yield with a refractometer you need to know the weight in and out. What is GSD?


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## shadow745 (Apr 29, 2012)

Trust me, I've done this enough and now at the point of leaving my machine/grinders dialed in and altering the roast to be exactly what I want. Some tend to think you can't possibly know how an extraction will taste or the texture it will have just by appearance, but I certainly know better. GSD is my way of saying Getting Shit Done!


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## MWJB (Feb 28, 2012)

shadow745 said:


> Trust me, I've done this enough and now at the point of leaving my machine/grinders dialed in and altering the roast to be exactly what I want. Some tend to think you can't possibly know how an extraction will taste or the texture it will have just by appearance, but I certainly know better. GSD is my way of saying Getting Shit Done!


 Do you have some sort of lasers in your eyes, or gravity beams? You can only see what is set up to happen from the moment you ground & dosed the coffee, then decide how much/little comes out of the PF...you can't influence the cup in any other way by simply looking at it. If you do have this power, I'm sure I can think of much more entertaining & important uses for it than making a cup of coffee.

Additionally, we can't see what you can see when we're making our own coffee, if you think it's working for you great, but there is now way to translate this to anyone outside of you immediate presence.


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## GrahamS (Aug 27, 2015)

How is it being measured?


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## Rob1 (Apr 9, 2015)

GrahamS said:


> How is it being measured?


 There's a sensor under the drip tray cover.


http://imgur.com/MVbib9i




http://imgur.com/ZMCd0EG


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## GrahamS (Aug 27, 2015)

that's really neat. I love Frankenmachines.


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## Stanic (Dec 12, 2015)

It is nicely integrated


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## phario (May 7, 2017)

shadow745 said:


> Thing is people get so caught up chasing numbers they usually piss away a lot of time, coffee, etc. Like some on many forums just go on and on about how a scale 'must' be used to weigh output to be consistent. I'll call total B.S. on that any day and gladly prove it any way possible. The newbies end up listening to that sort of thing and think they have it wrong if the numbers don't match. Only variable I have ever gone by is the dry dose for every extraction. Other than that it's skill, patience and the determination to GSD and it works great for me.





shadow745 said:


> Trust me, I've done this enough and now at the point of leaving my machine/grinders dialed in and altering the roast to be exactly what I want. Some tend to think you can't possibly know how an extraction will taste or the texture it will have just by appearance, but I certainly know better. GSD is my way of saying Getting Shit Done!


 Surely this must be a troll? These posts are pretty amusing, to be fair.

Nobody is saying that it can't be done by experience and feel to the extent where you can enjoy good consistent espresso. What people are saying is that by measuring outflow weight, you can try and be more consistent and cut down on other variances. That's hardly surprising cutting-edge logic.

Moreover, this was just a fun experiment to learn more about a variety of tools that are not only incredibly educational, but that are probably serving to get people employed---ranging from the design of circuitboards to 3D printing to electrical engineering. If you read the Reddit post, it was fairly clear he wasn't claiming this was going to make great espresso.

It's this kind of stuff that inspires the "OK boomer" meme.

Reading your post, though, reminds me of how interesting it was to watch the rise of PID devices in coffee machines via the online communities in the late 90s and early 00s. These were engineers and people from different careers who wondered if there were ways to regulate the temperatures in coffee machines. This inspired a whole subculture and indeed was a revolution in the espresso industry. I'm sure at the time there were a number of people with "In my day...." stories as well, and who would scoff at how stupid it is to attach some newfangled box to your machine when they could produce perfectly good espresso blindfolded after 25 years of experience.


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## shadow745 (Apr 29, 2012)

Definitely no troll, just call things as I see them. It's hilarious when someone posts in disagreement that they're automatically crowned as being a troll as if we should all agree on everything. Forums are for discussion, positive or negative...

Of course modern technology has a place, but IMBHO nothing will ever trump skill/experience. For example, look at what machine manufacturers are cranking out in an effort to achieve 'better' espresso with the rage on flow/pressure profiling, etc. Funny that manual levers like the Cremina, Pavoni, etc. have been around many decades and can still walk all over ANY modern machine. Just can't beat old school for many applications.

Whatever morons like to use the lame 'boomer' B.S. are a joke. I still seriously appreciate what many generations before me did for this world as so many seem to forget the past and don't respect it. Each new generation thinks they can outdo previous generations, when truth be told each generation becomes more lazy in general in an effort to aim for more technology and less hands-on.

Of course I get it that many like to obtain consistency to minimize errors, etc., but many of them would be absolutely lost without a scale in front of them and have to rely on skill/technique for a change. Having to rely on a scale to measure output is just a fad like all others. Over the years I've seen lots of fads come/go and some do become a daily regimen for many, but some are tossed aside like old clothes. It's almost to the point of people trying to come up with solutions for a known problem. Look at what I will gladly call the pathetic Turd Wave (3rd) as most coffee being roasted these days tastes like shit if you ask for my take on it. These coffees are what I'd consider barely roasted as so little development has taken place and of course now the die hard enthusiasts just have to try this grinder or that one, different burr sets, low pressure pre-infusion/long extractions to try making this swill drinkable. I get it that not resting on laurels and shooting for a possible improvement is good for many things in life, but old school rules in many ways.


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## Stanic (Dec 12, 2015)

phario said:


> Surely this must be a troll? These posts are pretty amusing, to be fair.


 I tend to agree


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## phario (May 7, 2017)

shadow745 said:


> Definitely no troll, just call things as I see them. It's hilarious when someone posts in disagreement that they're automatically crowned as being a troll as if we should all agree on everything. Forums are for discussion, positive or negative...
> 
> Of course modern technology has a place, but IMBHO nothing will ever trump skill/experience. For example, look at what machine manufacturers are cranking out in an effort to achieve 'better' espresso with the rage on flow/pressure profiling, etc. Funny that manual levers like the Cremina, Pavoni, etc. have been around many decades and can still walk all over ANY modern machine. Just can't beat old school for many applications.
> 
> ...


 Just to be clear, it has nothing to do with contrarian opinions. Here are all sorts of opinions that might be aligned with a contrarian view:



Given the cost of paying for a microcontroller, load cells, and so forth, in terms of producing better espresso, I don't think it would help as much.


In my view, calculating the final shot weight is not as important as [these other things] because [of this].


I think there is an over-reliance on measurement devices when it comes to espresso making, and this over-reliance can cause the user to lose touch with [these elements].


The problem, which some people have noted, is that way that you push your opinions. It's statements like these:



> I'll call total B.S. on that any day and gladly prove it any way possible.





> GSD is my way of saying Getting Shit Done!


 or



> when truth be told each generation becomes more lazy in general in an effort to aim for more technology and less hands-on.


 or



> Look at what I will gladly call the pathetic Turd Wave (3rd) as most coffee being roasted these days tastes like shit if you ask for my take on it.


 or



> just call things as I see them.


 I mean...it's highly entertaining. I think it has already been established that the experiment that was conducted in the original post was more for an educational and technological experience rather than for the specific purpose of enhancing espresso. So I'm not sure what else needs to be said.


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## Mrboots2u (May 10, 2013)

@shadow745i don't care how you make coffee , neither should you . But perhaps spend some constructive time laying out some help for others on how you achieve your skills and tasty cups, put something in , rather than rambling about about the coffee world has changed . Plenty of places for you to buy beans you like from and same for others . 
just saying the way others makes coffee is bs doesn't help anyone actually help make coffee . 
post some pics , what colour is blond ,what texture so good, what volume is best .

In the end there is no magic , we all grind coffee , we all put water through it , how it tastes to a large degree is a function of when decide to stop the water going through the cofee.
your taste buds don't know if that is because of a colour it is , or a weight or volume used .

on a side note , i had someone try to tell me I should be stopping my coffee via the smell it produces , it worked for them , it god knows how it was meant to work for the rest of us mere mortals.


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## Stanic (Dec 12, 2015)

I think there exists a forum which he would call a happy place


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## shadow745 (Apr 29, 2012)

Simply clueless and annoying, lmao!


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## Daniel R (Feb 2, 2020)

Rob1 said:


> There's a sensor under the drip tray cover.
> 
> 
> http://imgur.com/MVbib9i
> ...


 Awesome, I have had the same idea.

Daniel


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