I've never had any trouble with my Dualit burr grinder. I grind on the absolute finest setting, actually adjusting it slightly past the 'minimum' mark seems to make a difference. Could it be that your tamp strength needs adjusting? Can't work out whether you need to push harder or softer from your description, mind you.
I'm using a Rancilio Silvia - very very nice machine, but I've found not much margin for error in grind/tamp.
Yes I do - with a Dualit burr grinder set on the finest setting.
There's your problem. My Dualit is very sensitive to the beans being used. My best results have been with Sainsbury's espresso beans, straight from a fresh packet. Oddly, the worst were beans direct from a local roaster, which in theory should be the best!
I have a Dualit grinder. There are instructions on t'internet showing how to modify it to enable it to grind finer. If you're using yours on the finest setting then you might want to try mucking about with it so that you can try going finer. I did. It's easy and works.
fresh tin of illy
oxymoron.
it was probably many weeks or months since the roasting date (which they don't print on the tin)
There is almost no point in trying to fanny about with fine grinding and getting a good crema if you are ignoring the rest of what a good espresso should be. Get a stopwatch, a decent tamper and a lined shot glass and get calibrating.
Ball park figures for a double is 16g of coffee tamped (you need to work that out for pressure - no torque wrench tampers for heavy handed) and the pull should take about 20 seconds and yield about 85ml or just under 3 fluid oz. Too short and not enough flavour, too long and too bitter. It is very easy to get too fine a grind if you don't do the rest of the stuff mentioned. Vary the grind to get the 20 seconds and 85ml.
Looking like a wee Guinness during a calibration.
Hora, did you ever manage to get a decent crema from your classic? I have one and I'm struggling, tips please!!
If you've got these filters, stop using them and get a standard filter instead.
Better still get a bottomless portafilter.
The Crema Perfetta stuff is basically there to allow you to use rubbish coffee from supermarkets and badly ground coffee. It's a pressure based filter and does a poor attempt of a crema and taste is not really much better than a £50 plastic machine. Oh and the other filter for pods, which are just stale ground coffee in a pod for an excessive price.
I'm very new to all this but already realised that grinding is key. Good quality burr grinder is essential, if not more so than the coffee machine. Good dosing and tamping techniques, and when using a Classic, it's a manual machine mostly that needs you to time shots and be careful with the temperature.
If you can get past the posh bloke, this video is a good guide to making coffee with the Classic http://youtu.be/F4RWqaF2F8c
It's best to keep fresh roasted beans in the fridge and grind them on demand with a burr grinder. I'm lazy and in general use freshly *opened* tins of Illy.
Two things stop my G Classic from making good crema:
- coffee is too old (solution is drink lots, or throw away once the tin is "off")
- coffee not tamped hard enough (get a metal tamper, the plastic one that came with the machine is difficult to tamp hard enough with. Tamp so hard that the machine has to really work to push the water through, it should come as a really slow stream, almost breaking into individual drips.)
Oh, it's good to either wait for the head to get properly hot. Or at the very least run a load of heated water through it empty before brewing.
Perhaps descale occasionally depending on your water.
Certainly unscrew #44, #45 (in the diagram below) to clean behind occasionally.
http://www.sreweb.com/diagrams/classcoffegaggia.gif
hth
Tamp so hard that the machine has to really work to push the water through, it should come as a really slow stream, almost breaking into individual drips
Read my post on time, quantity and grind. You get them all right and you get good coffee. Ramming it in there with too fine or too coarse a grind just gets you no coffee or brown water.
wot he said ^
get a decent grinder.
get a decent tamper
use good coffee, this is not available from a supermarket or a foil sealed tin but from a coffee merchant where they roast/blend their own beans and can tell you the roasting date when asked (or it's stamped on the bag)
learn how to use all of the above, it's not difficult to find the sweet spot of grind/tamp/dose to get coffee that's streets ahead of costa/starbucks/stove-tops/tassimo etc.
Got a good grinder that can choke the machine, got a decent tamp, got a different basket. Think I'll try different coffee.
I can't get good crema either from my Gaggia Dose. I've moaned about it before.
I've used all kinds of different coffee, all sorts of grinds and tamps. I've had it spurting through and dripping through. All these things make big differences to the coffee but NOT the damn crema.
My parents' Cuisinart gives tons of lovely crema no matter what they do. Supermarket ground coffee, no problems. My previous cheaper machine also gave loads of crema.
This leads me to conclude it's the machine - or at least my particular one.
if it's a recent machine it will have replaced the regular filters with a Crema Perfetta filter and one for using those branded pods
Hmm.. mine came with a small and large filter and one for pods - is that what you are talking about?
if your basket looks like this:
then bin it. it's the 'perfect crema device' and is designed to get crema from crap coffee, the best basket to use is the double basket, looks like this:
Oh I have that second one you post. Still not impressed so far. I found there was some adjustment in my OPV, so I tried lowering the pressure and it made it worse. I was in the process of trying to raise it with a shim on the spring and I broke it.
my opv was the opposite way to what the forum said, then it broke and I got a new machine
It was the opposite way? Meaning what? The pressure was too low?
I think it said clockwise to lower pressure, mine was anti-clockwise.
where can I get a replacement basket from? I have the crap perfect crema device that just blocks up with limescale/coffee particles over time.
Talking about Gaggia Classic I think I need to de-scale mine soon ... 
http://www.happydonkey.co.uk do replacement baskets/filters.
I strongly recommend getting the bottomless portafilter however. Excellent coffee and crema and pretty too as it pours out. Many of the coffee sites recommend the ultimate is to go 'naked' 
They also do grinders, tampers and coffee. Plus you can get a backflush basket, which is basically a basket with no holes to clean through the machine. Check if it's okay to use on your machine, but should be okay on a Classic.
And also for good coffee, try http://www.hasbean.co.uk
Descaling, I live in a hard water area and use filtered water which will help avoid build up. Occasionally you may need to go through the descale process though but should be less frequent. Filtering is also useful if you have high chlorine water to get rid of the nasty tastes from it.
Happy Donkey do the Rancilio steam wand for the Classic, as requested by Mastiles a few days ago. Clicky
They also do a splendid grinder (Iberital, that dispenses a measured freshly-ground dose into your portafilter) and a whole bunch of other good stuff, including rather fine beans.
Is it just me who finds all of Hasbean's beans a bit bitter?
@molgrips - The new crema basket could also look like a double basket with pattern covering the whole base. The give away is there's actually just one tiny hole in the bottom side and that plastic thing used in the portafilter.
The new models will also have an extra leaflet with the instructions stating that the baskets have been replaced by the new ones.
Whilst the Classic is a great machine, this is the worst thing they could have done to the machine really. Though I suppose as these are sold in high street shops (I got mine from Argos!), then you're going to get a lot of people non the wiser just popping into the supermarket and getting pre-ground espresso coffee or even just picking up filter coffee! These gadgets make a half arsed attempt at giving them something resembling coffee.
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