I’ve not made this is a secret on here before but conversely putting too much ‘love’ into my routine made me not want to make coffee. When I first got into home espresso, I’d be single dosing, WDT, measuring my tamp, tasting over and over until it tasted right to me.
Whilst I totally agree for the very best results this kind of care and attention is important, it sucked the fun out of it for me. Wastage when dialling in very light ‘trendy’ roasts also made me not want to bother.
So the ‘love’ I put in these days is topping up the hopper every couple of days with an eyeballed 100g beans dosing somewhere between 18.8/19.2g, no WDT, tamping and extracting. I still get far better coffee than I can get anywhere nearby and for me it’s a really enjoyable workflow. I also leave the lighter roasts for when I visit a decent coffee shop. It baffles me how some of the people buying these 100g bags of pricey ultra-light roasts manage to get an actual shot without wasting it all dialling in.
I saw a triple-pack recently from a fairly big roaster, £30 or something for three 100g bags. I figured I might as well just feed £30 cash through my grinder and pour it down the sink.
I should add that the Bianca has helped me a lot with the above workflow. The ‘shot-saver’ paddle as I now refer to it means that I can almost always extract something enjoyable even if the grind is slightly off.
For filter I’m still pretty meticulous, weighing and timing and dialling in, trying different beans etc, but for espresso I just like a simpler approach.