Dave Snowdon

I finally discovered that the secret to getting a decent crema out of my De’Longhi coffee machine was to load in about 30% more coffee that I would normally do. I spent way too long thinking it was all about how hard I tamped down the coffee and trying either a lot of pressure or very little - that seemed to affect how fast the coffee came out of the machine but very little else. The De’Longhi seems to have a fairly feeble pump and if you tamp the coffee down too much the coffee drips out at an infuriatingly slow rate (once I got no coffee and just a lot of steam escaping from the gasket).