A double espresso should take roughly 25 to 32 seconds to reach twice its dose in weight. Much faster than that and the water is not meeting enough resistance, which means it is not spending enough time in the coffee.
Work through these in order.
Grind finer. The coffee bed is what resists the pump, and a coarse bed barely resists at all. This is the first and usually the only change needed. One step at a time — grind adjustments compound quickly.
Check your dose. Weigh it. A basket rated 18 g with 16 g in it has headroom above the puck, and water pools there and escapes round the sides rather than pushing through. Fill the basket to its rating.
Look at the stream. If you have a bottomless portafilter, watch the underside. A fast shot that also sprays sideways from one or two points is channelling, not a grind problem — water has bored a path around the puck. Grinding finer makes channelling worse, not better.
When it is fast and you cannot go finer
If you are already at the fine end of your grinder’s range and shots still run fast, the grinder is the limitation. Many grinders sold for “espresso and filter” have only two or three usable steps inside the espresso band, so the setting you need simply does not exist.
The pressurised basket exception
If your machine came with pressurised (dual-wall) baskets, the flow rate is controlled by a small valve rather than by your coffee. Shots will look and time roughly the same whatever you do, and grinding finer changes almost nothing. That is the basket working as designed, and it is also why the coffee cannot get much better.
Questions people actually ask
Is a fast shot always bad?
Not always — some modern light roasts are brewed deliberately fast and long as a “turbo shot”. But an accidentally fast shot with a normal recipe is under-extracted, and it tastes sour and thin.
Does tamping harder slow the shot?
Marginally, and it is the wrong lever. Above roughly 15 kg the puck is about as dense as it gets. Consistent, level tamping matters; tamping harder to compensate for a coarse grind does not work.
Last reviewed 8 August 2026