Food & DrinkThe BestieIntermediate
Dialing In Your Coffee, a free food & drink course on Tomo

Dialing In Your Coffee

Move beyond the recipe and learn to manipulate variables like a professional barista to find the 'sweet spot' in every bean.

Like Duolingo, but for Dialing In Your Coffee. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.

A short one: 12 levels across 2 sections, about 24 minutes end to end, roughly 5 days at five minutes a day. It moves through The Art of the Dial-In and The Science of the Bean. It assumes you already know the basics.

12 bite-size levelsAbout 5 minutes each

Free forever · No credit card · iPhone & Android

Barney the Barista Bean, the guide who teaches the Dialing In Your Coffee course
Dialing In Your Coffee
with Barney the Barista Bean
12
Levels
2
Sections
5
Min/day
What you'll learn

Key ideas in Dialing In Your Coffee

  • Finer particles increase the total surface area available for water to dissolve flavors
  • Acids dissolve first, creating a concentrated but sour 'front' to the shot
  • A tighter pack of fine grounds creates more resistance, slowing down the water flow
  • Sugars and oils follow, providing the body and sweetness of the 'middle'
  • Heavier plant fibers and tannins extract last, adding bitterness to the 'tail'
  • How grind size simultaneously affects surface area and water contact time
  • The sequential order of flavor compounds extracted during a shot
  • Crema inflation from CO2
  • Isolating variables
  • Grind size and resistance
  • Yield by weight
  • Extraction sequence
  • The 1:17 'Golden Ratio' provides a balanced starting point for most palates
  • Why weight is a more reliable metric for strength than crema-inflated volume
  • Lowering the water ratio increases the concentration of coffee for a heavier mouthfeel
  • The importance of isolating variables during the dialing-in process
Why not just Google it

You've tried the other tabs

Wikipedia

Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.

YouTube

You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.

ChatGPT

One answer, then back to scrolling.

Online courses

Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.

Tomo gives Dialing In Your Coffee the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.

Try a question

Here's what playing it feels like

A real question from this course. Take your best guess.

Surface Area and the Salami Shot

If you were to taste only the very first few drops of an espresso, what flavor profile would you expect to dominate?

Get it right to open this lesson and 11 more in the app.

Course map

Where Dialing In Your Coffee takes you

  1. 1

    The Art of the Dial-In

    • The Calibration Loop
    • Diagnosing Extraction
    • Water and Heat Dynamics
  2. 2

    The Science of the Bean

    • Roast Chemistry and Terroir

2 sections · 4 units · 12 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.

How it's taught

You pick the voice

This course
The Bestie

Dialing In Your Coffee is taught in the The Bestie style: your friend who just gets it. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.

Keep going

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Start free

Start Dialing In Your Coffee today.

Download Tomo, search Dialing In Your Coffee, and play your first lesson in under a minute.