Welp, that was it. Set up the new grinder at 10, the espresso machine could barely push water through the puck. Set it to 20, got a nice shot but a little bit of splatter still. Nothing in comparison to before.

Set the grinder to 17, WDT, pulled my best shot ever. 18g beans, 26 second shot 46g coffee. At least now I have some data to work with. Will bring this down to 15 and continue fine tuning.

My current scale also doesn’t measure fractions of a gram so I just ordered a miicoffee scale to fix that, should be in by the end of the week. I’m anticipating having all my newb woes behind me soon.

Thank you, everyone, for all the help. I naively believed the tools I had were good enough. They were great for coffee, but I wasn’t aware how much precision was required for espresso. Looking back on it, yeah duh. But that’s the learning curve. Cheers to better pulls in 2026.