About Dial Your Shot

A tool for espresso lovers, by espresso lovers.

What is this?

Dial Your Shot is a free, browser-based espresso brewing guide that helps you improve your espresso, one shot at a time. You enter your dose, yield, grind size, extraction time, temperature, pressure, and then rate how the final shot actually tastes. The app uses those inputs to suggest practical adjustments, hints, and next-step recommendations to help you make the next shot better.

Who it is for

Dial Your Shot is for beginners who need a clear first framework, for home baristas who want to be more consistent, and for experienced espresso enthusiasts who enjoy testing recipes, comparing variables, and refining their process.

Whether you're just getting started with espresso or you've been dialing in shots for years, our goal is simple: give you a helpful starting point, a clearer diagnosis, and useful guidance for moving closer to that elusive sweet spot.

Our approach

We're passionate about coffee, but we're also humble about what we know. The algorithm behind Dial Your Shot was built by carefully studying a wide range of trusted sources, including specialty coffee research, barista community knowledge, and extraction science. We've tried to turn that into something practical, accessible, and useful in the moment when you're trying to understand why a shot tasted the way it did.

The recommendations come from a fixed set of rules, not from an AI model, so the same shot and the same taste report always lead to the same advice. That said, espresso is complex, and every machine, grinder, bean, and environment is different. Our model is a guide, not a guarantee. It does not try to tell you exactly how a shot should taste in theory; it reacts to the taste result you report and suggests where to adjust next. We're continuously working to improve the algorithm, and we actively seek feedback from more experienced people, professional baristas, roasters, and dedicated home brewers to make sure the recommendations stay grounded in reality.

The Espresso Compass

The Espresso Compass is a taste-first way to dial in. You tell it whether the shot tasted sour, bitter, watery, or harsh, and it places the shot on two axes: extraction (how much of the coffee dissolved) and strength (how concentrated the cup is). It then shows the one lever that moves you back toward the sweet spot, and where every other lever would take you.

• No refractometer needed - your palate is the only instrument it asks for.
• Sour and bitter together are recognised as channeling, which no grind setting fixes.
• It knows when your grinder, basket, or machine has run out of room, and suggests what still helps.
• You can optionally tell it how many seconds of shot time one grinder step changes, so grind advice becomes a concrete number of steps.
• Each shot you record stays on the compass as a trail, so you can see what your last change actually did.

The compass works without an account. Shots you record there are kept only for your current visit; your grinder calibration is remembered in a small preference cookie on your device.

One recipe per bag of coffee

Every new bag of coffee needs dialing in again. When you are signed in, the main app lets you start a new bag, give it a name (for example "Ethiopia Guji"), and begin from the last recipe that worked for you instead of from scratch. When a shot tastes right, press "This one's good" and those exact numbers are saved as the recipe for that bag.

Opening your next bag moves the current one to your past bags, and the new one starts from your latest good recipe. You can load the current bag's recipe back into the tool at any time.

Saving your presets

You can also save espresso presets to our servers. A preset captures your full parameter setup - dose, yield, extraction time, temperature, pressure, pre-infusion, roast level, bean freshness, grind distribution, and grind size - so you can return to a known-good configuration or compare setups across sessions.

Signing in uses your Google account and requires only your email address. We request no other permissions. You can delete your account, together with all saved presets, bags, and game progress, at any time from your Profile page. See our Privacy Policy for full details on what is stored and how.

Dial It In - the espresso training game

Dial It In is the interactive side of Dial Your Shot. Instead of logging a real shot, you pull virtual espresso shots inside the browser, diagnose what's wrong with a flawed starting recipe, and correct it before your attempts run out. Everything is scored server-side so the results are fair and tamper-proof. The game is free and you can play it without an account; a Google sign-in saves your scores and progress and puts you on the leaderboards.

• Daily Challenge - a new pre-broken recipe every day, the same for every player. The first attempt is always a free diagnostic run so you can observe the fault; then you have five attempts to fix the shot above the pass threshold. Each week has a theme (extraction, beans, machine, or puck prep), consecutive days build a streak, and passing scores you submit appear on the daily and weekly leaderboards.
• Career mode - a structured sequence of progressive lessons. Each level focuses on a specific teaching goal (e.g. grind-size correction, ratio balancing, channeling detection, temperature surfing on a single-boiler machine). Pass a level by reaching its minimum score to unlock the next one. Career scores feed the all-time leaderboard.
• Training mode - unlimited shots, no pressure. Freely adjust grind size, dose, yield, extraction time, temperature, and pressure to see how each variable changes the flavor profile and score.
• Diagnose - a "taste detective" mode. The server pulls a mystery shot and you read the clues (taste, flow, crema) to name the cause. Every wrong guess reveals another clue.
• Weekend Gauntlet - open on Saturdays and Sundays: three escalating scenarios, exactly one attempt each, one cumulative score.

The game's extraction animation renders in real time in the browser: the shot glass fills, the crema layer forms, and the scale ticks up in grams. Before the shot you can prep the puck with a WDT tool and a tamp, and you decide when to stop the pour. When the shot ends, the server evaluates your flavor profile, computes a 0-100 score, awards 0-3 stars, and returns defect labels, correction hints, and theory notes - the same logic the main dialing tool uses, applied as an educational game.

A few extras help the lessons stick:

• Stop-point autopsy - after a shot, the game tells you whether stopping earlier or later would have saved the cup, or whether the recipe itself needs to change.
• One change at a time - a methodical bonus rewards changing a single variable and improving the cup, the habit that works best on a real machine too.
• Ghost shots - race a replay of your own best attempt, and, once a day has closed, the pour of that day's winning shot.
• Defect Codex - every defect you meet is recorded as encountered, corrected, and finally mastered when you can name it blind in Diagnose mode.
• Achievements - a small set of certifications for real skills, such as cutting a shot by eye at the blonding point, never for simply logging in.
• Virtual machines and upkeep - some lessons put you on a single-boiler machine, a heat-exchanger E61, or a PID dual boiler, and in Career and Training the virtual grinder burrs wear and the group head gets dirty until you backflush. These are compressed to game time; real equipment lasts much longer.

When you fix a defect in the game, you can open the main dialing tool with the same symptom preloaded and take the lesson to your real machine.

Finished a Daily Challenge or a Career level? The share button creates a result card with its own link and preview image - score, stars and attempts, never the recipe - so you can challenge friends without spoiling the day.

Tamp Talk - the community

Tamp Talk is where home baristas help each other. From the dialing tool you can share the exact shot you just pulled - recipe, grinder setting, taste and the app's diagnosis travel with it - publicly or as a link-only post. The link shows a preview card with your compass and recipe on Reddit, Facebook or WhatsApp.

• Replies with substance - threaded replies, likes and dislikes (only the net score is shown), and concrete suggestions such as "2 steps finer, +3 g yield" that open in the app with one click.
• A dial-in journal - post each new attempt to your thread; the compass draws the path, and you mark the thread dialed in when it tastes right, crediting the reply that fixed it.
• More than shots - categories for gear, beans and roasters, technique, the game and off-topic chat, plus the comments under every Coffee Theory article.
• Kept friendly - anyone can report a post, moderators act on reports, and new accounts have posting limits.

Reading Tamp Talk needs no account; posting, voting and sharing use the same free Google sign-in. Only your chosen username is ever shown - never your name or email.

Coffee Theory

Beyond the dialing tool we also publish Coffee Theory - a collection of in-depth articles covering espresso science, brewing technique, and the variables that shape the cup. Topics include the Espresso Compass, grind size mechanics, brew ratios, extraction science, temperature and pressure, espresso troubleshooting, choosing an espresso machine, coffee freshness and roast dates, single versus double shots, water for espresso, and a side-by-side comparison of brewing methods (espresso, AeroPress, pour over, French press, and more).

The articles are written with the same philosophy as the tool: grounded in real extraction science, practical, and honest about uncertainty. If you spot an error or have a better way to explain something, we'd genuinely like to hear from you.

Every article has its own discussion at the bottom, part of Tamp Talk: questions, objections and your own results are welcome there.

Gear recommendations

The Gear Recommendations page lists grinders, machines, and accessories we consider good value at different budgets. Some links on that page are Amazon affiliate links: if you buy through them, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. You can also leave an optional tip on Ko-fi. Both help keep Dial Your Shot free, and neither unlocks any extra features.

What we're working on

Dial Your Shot is an evolving project. On the roadmap: more brewing-method profiles, deeper roast-level guidance, more Coffee Theory articles, new game scenarios, and continued refinement of the correction algorithm based on feedback from the community. If something feels off or doesn't match your experience, we want to know - your palate and your machine are the ground truth.

Who made this?

Dial Your Shot was created by PiroTechnique, a coffee enthusiast who wanted a clean, distraction-free tool for improving espresso without having to dig through forum threads every morning.

It's free. The dialing tool, the Espresso Compass, Coffee Theory, and the Dial It In game work without an account. When you sign in to save presets, track your bags, or keep your game progress and appear on the leaderboards, we store only what is necessary to make those features work - nothing more.

Tamp Talk can be read without an account too. What you post there is public under your username, and you can edit or delete it at any time.