Hailie from the coffee team at Fellow here! As more of you receive your Series 1, we wanted to share a few tips to help you get the best experience out of your machine.

We’ll be posting more regularly here about Series 1 (and our other products). Nick, the product team, and I will be monitoring the subreddit closely to help troubleshoot, answer questions, and gather feedback. Here are a few hints for common questions we’re seeing:

Are your shots coming out in under 20 seconds?

If your shot is stopping too quickly even after adjusting your grind finer, it usually means the machine isn’t building enough resistance in the puck to reach pressure. See our guide for a step by step walkthrough on what to look for and how to fix this.

Turn On Brew Guidance

Not sure what adjustments to make after pulling a shot? Brew guidance tells you which way to adjust your grinder to get closer to the recommended time for your roast (and your chosen profile) after you’ve pulled your shot. You can enable it by going to:

Settings → Customization → Brew guidance → ON

Volumetric Brew Stop 

Out of the box, Series 1 uses what’s called “volumetric dosing.” (This is under Settings > Customization > Brew Stop > Volume.) This means that the machine estimates the volume of the shot using the flow of the water, not by measuring time during extraction or by weighing the shot. This approach is convenient, but can require some fine tuning and calibration. We have step-by-step instructions on how to calibrate your volumetric dosing here. In short, you will pull a manual shot using the fresh coffee, fine grounds, and basket you have selected up until this point. This is to make sure all those elements are indeed dialed in, and you can get a great manual shot. Next, you’ll pull a shot with volumetric dosing, and use the difference between the two to calibrate the machine. All of this is explained step by step here: Volumetric Dosing on Series 1.

If you prefer to get the exact target weight of your espresso in each shot, we recommend switching on to manual controls, where you will use a scale to measure the weight of your espresso shot, and start and stop your shots by pressing the Brew button on the machine when your target weight is reached. You can turn this on by going to Settings > Customization > Brew Stop > Off. This will be the most reliable way to ensure you get exactly the volume you want out of the machine for every shot!

Contacting us
We have a team of folks standing by to help guide you through the process of getting the most out of your Series 1. You can find all the ways to contact us here, including phone appointments, live chat, email, live virtual classes led by me (next one is 3/6 at 12 pm), and in person support in our SF and LA stores.