"Espresso is traditionally thought to taste best when water pushes through the coffee at 9 bars of pressure (131 psi), which most machines are built to deliver.

"Espresso is traditionally thought to taste best when water pushes through the coffee at 9 bars of pressure (131 psi), which most machines are built to deliver. ...with new types of coffee, though, theyre rethinking that standard." I only drink espresso, so knowing what these parameters are in my machine is important but I haven't a clue as they aren't published. Like the vast majority of us, my machine cost only a few hundreds, not thousands so this info is rarely available let alone the parameter being adjustable! I cannot say I've ever had even a really good cup of coffee from my machine or from any similar type within this price range, it might be possible but I seriously doubt it. As for the so-called God Shot, from my experience they're rare and I've never made one myself, they've always come out of the blue when I've least expected it, and in places where I'd not have expected to get a reasonable espresso let alone an exceptionally good one. However, in every instance they came from professional imported machines, usually from Italy (I've a habit of checking out espresso machines, grinders and how barristers work when ordering coffee). I've reluctantly come to the conclusion it's not possible to make an excellent espresso at home let alone a God Shot without a huge investment, lots of timeconsuming experimentation as well as lots of patience. And I've an insufficient quantity of all three so I settle for second best—local coffee shops where they do passable-to-good espressos and on very rare occasions an excellent one—but never a God Shot! "...I ground 17.5 grams of beans roasted exactly one month before. The tamp was slightly off, and I readied to throttle the water flow if it came out too fast. ...The result was, to me, perfectly balanced—not sour or bitter, neither thin nor sludgy,..." Unless one's an obsessive with lots of time and money as those in this story, it's too much to expect to make consistently excellent coffee at home, there are just too many parameters to control consistently. Even if one has a good handle on each, maintaining each variable within spec is nigh on impossible as they're often outside one's control—beans vary, so does the roast, likewise the consistency of grind and grinders will change, then there's the consistency of one's tamp, similarly one's machine. Making coffee at home is like doing a titration in chemistry where the strength of one's reagents is unknown and without any calibration marks on one's glassware! Nevertheless, even with my limited machine I've still found two things very important, the consistency of one's tamp and the quality of the grind. (My cheap grinder is hopeless as the size grind varies all over the place which means having beans ground on a professional grinder. Of course the disadvantage is that one cannot always make coffee with freshly-ground beans.)