Todays roast and thoughts

Nothing much new with todays roast, it's the same as two days ago, but with 45 seconds less in the last stage. My reason for this was that I found that roast to be just a little bit too burnt in smell, and I want to see what implications that has for taste. Also, these beans were directly up from the freezer, so the change for them must have been very drastic.

Regarding grinding, I've found this advice: The grind should be just slightly finer than sugar. Kinda sandy but you can smoosh it together with your fingers. However, doing this I get no crema. Using Lavazza or Illy (which are about grinded to about sugar size) I got no crema. Using supermarket beans I get little crema. Using fresh roasted beans I get crema, but just a couple of millimeters, not the excess of crema as seen on many videos and reported by other Pavoni users.

In other news I'm looking at tampers. It seems that there's more to it than I thought. The La Pavoni Pro I have should probably have a 51mm tamper, but now I've found that they make them both flat and convex. So many choices....

Oh, btw, Coffee Geek has a nice iRoast 2 review released two days ago

. Also I found a nice La Pavoni Introduction.