How to Clean Your Commercial Espresso Machine?
Most coffee shops don’t take the time to maintain their bar additions like espresso machine and their coffee grinder. That said cleaning your espresso machine does not take more than 10 minutes and it pays off in terms of customer satisfaction and improving the service life of your machine. Below we walk you through the steps required to clean a commercial espresso machine.
Start by taking a clean lint free cloth and rinse it with hot water to wipe off the steam wands. The idea here is to remove all the stains and stickiness from this area. However, do not use a sharp tool to scrape off anything since it will result in scratches. If you see that the wand is threaded you can unscrew it and then give it a thorough wash. The inside of the tip can be cleaned using a thin wire.
Fill a small bucket with around 3 inches of hot water. Then pour is some commercial espresso machine cleaning fluid after which you can soak all the parts in this overnight.
Using a screwdriver you can take out the filter basket. Start by cleaning the filter basket using running water / under a tap. You can also use some soap if required. You can then put the basket back into the bucket solution for an overnight soak.
Add half a teaspoon of commercial espresso cleaning fluid into a blind filter. Then lock the group handle and use the manual override button to flush all the water into this grouphead. This will cause the cleaner to start a backwash directly into the machine which will also de-scale it. However, you shouldn’t just turn on the water because it will burn out the machine’s solenoid which is responsible for operating the valve. You can instead hold the override button for around 3 seconds, and then turn it off to repeat it again 10 times.
The next thing you should do is to turn off the espresso machine to open up the steam wands in order to purge all the steam and to fully de-pressurize it. You can leave it open for around 8 hours.
Within the grouphead are the shower heads. Just look inside the group head and you will see them. There is a small screw which holds the shower screen as well as a brass plate. You can simply unscrew the plate and the screen. Then you can scrub them both using a scouring paid and add them to the bucket we prepared earlier.
Pull out all the gratings connected to the drip tray and then pull out the tray in order to drain it. Then clean the drip tray as well as the gratings after which you can leave them to dry overnight. Make sure that you don’t put them back into your machine until they are 100% dry.
Finally once you put everything back together use a few paper towels to buff the machine itself. This will make your machine shine like new.
