Balancing your extraction

With the Breville Barista Express®, coffee lovers enjoy beautifully extracted espresso drinks in their own home, any time they want. As our most popular manual espresso machine, the Breville Barista Express® can grind, dose, and extract espresso all at once, offering users a professional experience from the comfort of their kitchen. 
This is possible thanks to our iconic 4 keys formula—and in this video, our host shows users exactly how that works. Watch them demonstrate how to use Key 1 for dosing, Key 2 for water temperature control, Key 3 for pressure, and Key 4 for steaming milk. 
Following this tutorial, Professional Barista Leo Schmidt will show how different extraction results might look and what causes them—much of it comes down to grind size, temperature, dose, and bean quality. See our video examples of how sour, under-extracted espresso is caused by an overly quick water flow due to coarse grounds, while over-extracted beans is caused by the opposite.These issues can be corrected by choosing a different grind size. 
This process is called “dialing in” by baristas and coffee professionals—and now you’re an expert, too. Once you’ve mastered extraction, you can experiment with latte art, bean blending, and more!