Time to Clean the Equipment! Really.

About 3 weeks ago my wife and I started noticing an odd rubbery metallic taste/smell to my espresso drinks. We had some immediate suspicions. The first was the cup itself. We had just picked up some new fun mugs at IKEA in Chicago and figured the nasty smell came from the cup. We swapped out cups and thankfully it wasn’t our new mugs. My next guess was the espresso blend itself.

I thought the beans smelled a little different when grinding. I know sometimes too much Robusta in a espresso blend can give the cup that flavor so I emailed my local roaster to see if there was anything new or maybe a bad roast batch had been reported (anything!). Nope, dead end. Time to clean the Ranchilio Rocky grinder.

I unscrewed the plate that holds the hopper and unthreaded the top burr. Yup, a 1/4 inch of yucky oils and residue. I got it all clean and cleaned the small cavities around the bottom burr. Fixed right? Nope, another dead end. Time to clean the machine.

I started with descaler, soaked all the components (wow – the portafilter!). The first shot I pulled revealed no change. I start wondering about that gasket in the brewhead that’s been there for 5+ years and the scary process of backflushing that I’ve not done (because of the vendor recommendations). I stumble across a great website (there are many for this machine) that finally gives me the courage to do these two things. I ordered a rubber insert for the portafilter that turns it into a blind (which forces pressure back into the machine for backflushing). In addition I picked up a $5 gasket. $10 in parts, $10 in shipping (boooo…!)

After emptying the machine and turning it on the side I wrestle out the gasket. Prying it out from the innermost part seemed to be the trick. To say there was a lot of oil and burnt reside in this area would have been an understatement. After removing it I used a standard espresso cleaning brush to get every corner of that brass brew head clean. Putting the new gasket in was simply, insert smooth side down and push. Next I backflush. I first put the knobby part of this rubber stopper down into the spout (made sense to me) but it didn’t seal, upside down did the trick. I flushed it several times and let it sit for a bit, then cleaned it out and backflushed again with water. After putting it all back together I pulled a couple shots with old beans.

The moment of truth. Will I be cursed forever with rubbery metal flavored coffee? I was happy to only smell coffee flavors when I dumped the 2 shots into the hot water to make an Americano! Gasket, backflush, who knows – one or both of them did the trick.

I found a lot of people complaining about this same issue on the net (but not a lot of answers). If you have a similar issue read the above links and order from Chris Coffee (I got parts in a few days). Gotta run, time for another Americano.