So, I recently had the chance to visit Victoria, BC for a little vacay, and guess where I ended up? The CoffeeGeek Lab, aka Mark Prince’s crib! (okay, it was his very nice arts and crafts style home). The place is sensory overload if you are into coffee, though a lot of it is tucked away. He happened to have an espresso machine up on the test bench, one that I could only dream of owning: a Lelit Bianca V3 machine.

Let me tell you, that Lelit is absolute next level. You can tweak your shot pressure in at least five different ways:

• There’s a preinfusion mode that you can program however you like.
  
• You can start your shot with a low flow setting for a bit.
  
• Or end it with a low flow setting.
  
• You can manually control the pressure flow with this slick wood lever on top of the E61 grouphead, watching the forward mount pressure gauge for real time feedback.
  
• If you’ve got it hooked up to your plumbing, it can even use your home’s water line pressure for some extra oomph, delivering 40-55PSI water to the machine’s lines and system.

And get this, you can mess around with that line pressure even more. Like, you can have the water flowing to the grouphead at a steady 1.5-2BAR without even using the pump; this is achieved by deft handling of the brew lever, engaging it, but not letting it click the pump actuator piston.

It’s like a barista’s dream come true. And it’s a looker too. No wonder folks call it an end gamer.

But that’s not all. Mark also had this other gem on the bench, the Profitec GO. Now, this beautiful piece of engineering is a single boiler beast with all the bells and whistles: PID controls, top-notch parts, all-metal build – you name it. And it’s got a pressure gauge too. Sure, it doesn’t have a fancy preinfusion mode, but the GO has something else up its sleeve.

See, you can actually manually tweak the pressure during a shot by messing with the directly accessible over pressure valve (OPV) via a brass screw right on top of the machine. But here’s the kicker – you don’t even have to do that to get some pressure profiling tricks happening on this machine.

The Pressure Profile Hack

Just like the Gaggia Classic Pro, you can divert some water on the Profitec GO through the steam wand while pulling a shot. That lowers the pressure in the grouphead. So, by playing with the steam knob, you can start with low pressure and ramp it up as you go. You can also open the steam knob towards the end of the shot, to reduce the final brewing pressure. You get all the benefits of a lever espresso shot with its declining pressure, but with the added benefits of a pump driven, PID controlled semi-automatic espresso machine.

And here’s where it gets even cooler. The GO’s pressure gauge gives you real-time feedback on what’s happening inside. So, you can fine-tune your pressure profile like a pro. Plus, since it’s PID-controlled and has a bigger boiler, it handles temperature fluctuations way better than the Gaggia Classic. The Classic doesn’t have a PID to regulate the temperature, and its boiler is 1/5th the size of the GO. The water debit from this trick is pretty high, and the Gaggia can’t keep up, especially if you try to ramp down the pressure at the end of a shot. Trust me, I own a Classic Pro. I’ve been there. The GO, on the other hand? A lot more capable.

This trick should work on any machine that diverts water flow to the steam wand when you open the steam knob during a shot. You can find out if your machine is capable of this, easy peasy.

Just run a blank shot (no coffee used) through the grouphead and portafilter. When you see water coming out of the spouts, open the steam knob on the steam wand. If some water diverts, now also coming out of the wand, you’re golden.

If no water comes out of the steam wand, or the water stops flowing out of the grouphead, only flowing out the steam wand, the machine has microswitch-activated solenoids that 100% divert pumped water to one side or the other, and this pressure trick can’t be done on them.

If your machine can do this pressure profile hack, well get ready for a lot of espresso brewing adventures ahead!