Product Maintenance | How To Backflush An Espresso Machine
Is your espresso less tasty than it once was? Has your machine been acting up? Regular espresso machine care is essential to maintaining a healthy machine and enjoying scrumptious shots. In the next 4 minutes, we'll bring you up to speed on backflushing, the most important procedure for keeping your gear happy.
Transcript
Hey, Chris here from Prima Coffee Equipment, and today we're talking about how to take care of your espresso machine. We're just going through one quick lesson of backflushing the group in your machine. Let's get started. Backflushing the group in your machine is going to help to clean out a lot of the oil and grit that gets sucked back into the group when you brew. By doing this just occasionally, you're going to be able to preserve a lot of those parts and make sure that you're always ready to make great coffee. This is what you're going to need.
Full Circle Espresso Machine Cleaning Powder
This cleaner eliminates residue in espresso group heads, valves, and water ways. It is designed for both automatic and semi-automatic espresso machines.
Featured Product
Start with the backflush disk. This is just a blank portafilter basket comes standard with almost any espresso machine. You're also going to need some coffee equipment wash. This particular stuff Urnex's Full Circle we really like, it's really effective at cleaning. It also, it's made with all-natural ingredients so the ingredient list is very transparent, nothing scary in there, so you can rest assured you're getting no taste and nothing harmful in your body. Also, get some sort of group brush you can see this one has been well used; someone's taking care of their machine. That's used just to scrub the gaskets and back inside the group head right there. Then you're also going to need a portafilter, and the machine that's all hot and ready to go.
First step is going to be just taking out the portafilter and using your brush to scrub inside there. You're just scrubbing all up in the gasket there, and getting in all those different nooks and crannies making sure you're loosening any grit that's there, also scrubbing on the machine. Just give that a nice scrub for a moment, set that aside. You're then going to pop out the normal basket in your portafilter and replace it with the backflush or blank disk right there. Get your equipment wash ready and you just need to get a little pinch in there. Just one little pinch of that cleaner,you'll be good to go for now. You're going to lock this in the group as normal, and then for about five seconds just brew as if you're making espresso. Let me get that pump ring.
After a few seconds, I'm going to turn that off and you'll see all that release through this valve in the back, just like that. It's just forcing everything that would normally come out through the portafilter basket, through the group, and out of this valve right here. I'm going to do that again. After just a few seconds and you're going to repeat that a couple times. A couple times of running it for about five seconds and then releasing it, and letting it rest for a few seconds too. After you repeat that a few times, you can take this portafilter out and just rinse it off. You can actually, maybe - you saw some grit coming loose, and that water was actually a little bit brown. I'm going to rinse it off so there's no cleaner left in there. I'm going to give it another little scrub on the screen up in those cracks, and then I'm going to actually do the same thing again, just one backflush cycle with just water. No cleaner in it this time.
Now, I'm using water to get out any cleaner that might have hung out in there still. Release that. Then, you're just about good to go. Pop that disk out, replace with a normal disk, and then just prepare a shot as you normally would. Go ahead and pull that shot, and don't drink it, you can just toss that one and that will prime your machine for next time. Your group should now be clean, ready to go. Doing that regularly is really going to help you just by taking care of all those inside parts - taking care of that gasket, loosening grit, cleaning out oil, all that stuff - it's going to help you make sure you're always ready to make great espresso. We recommend doing what I just did with detergent about once every month or so, and as often as you like without detergent. Do that and your machine will always be ready for you. Thanks for watching.
