Sanremo F18SB Espresso Machine: Ultimate How To Guide

How To’s and Walkthrough of the Sanremo F18 SB Single boiler

Welcome to our “Complete” User Guide for the Sanremo F18SB. I say “complete” because I’m sure there’s probably a lot we have missed, and many questions left unanswered about this machine. This article contains demonstrations for four of the most commonly asked about settings and features of the F18SB, with written guides for making your way through the system menu and various settings.

If you can’t find what you’re looking for, be sure to let us know what we’ve missed by sending us your query – Contact Us. First up, let’s dive into the machine itself and see what you get with the Sanremo F18 SB Espresso Machine.

Sanremo F18SB Machine Walkthrough

How to Enter the F18SB Settings Menu

Most of the settings and features we’re going to discuss in this guide are found within the system settings menu of the F18 SB. To access the settings menu, press and hold the middle shot button on the left grouphead until you see ‘heating cup’ on the system screen. This should take around 10 seconds.

Now you’re in the system menu you can flick through the different pages using the second and fourth shot buttons, which will take you to a number of settings including:

• Heating Cup: Turn on/off the cup warming heater.
• LED Bar: Switch on/off the light across the group head buttons.
• Economy: Enable/disable the energy saving mode.
• Doses Setting: Adjust shot volume programmes.
• Pre-brewing: Enable/disable and adjust pre-infusion settings.
• Flush Message: Enable/disable a cleaning reminder on-screen.
• Clock adjust.
• Counters: View coffee shot counters.
• Cleaning groups: Start an automatic cleaning cycle.

How to Adjust Shot Programmes and Dose Settings

There are two ways of adjusting the shot programmes and dose settings on your F18 SB, first is by manually brewing, recording and saving a volume dose into the settings. To do this, you’ll need to manually measure your dose using an external scale.

Setting the Dose Programmes

First, prepare your portafilter with your required dose, say 18 grams of coffee, and then place it into the group head. To set the dose settings for your F18SB, hold down the middle shot button on the left hand group head until you see ‘doses setting, select dose in 30s. Let go of the middle button, and now press any button on the group head to select its dose setting for programming. Using a scale under your cup, begin the espresso extraction and press again to stop the brew when the shot has reached your desired output weight, for example 40 grams.

The SB will then save that dose setting and reproduce the same volume of water going into the portafilter every time you press that shot button. This can be repeated for all shot buttons, and will copy and save the dose across all group heads. Wait 30 seconds and the machine will exit the menu ready for brewing.

Fine Tuning Shot Volumes

The second method lets you fine tune the dose to a single millilitre, and lets you have different dose settings for each group head.

To adjust the dose, hold down the middle shot button until you reach the full settings menu. Scroll through to the dose settings and select it using the middle button. You can now scroll through all of the individual dose settings using the second and fourth shot buttons, with G1 referring to group head one on the left. The screen will show the icon of the shot button you have selected, and you can tweak the dose setting up and down using the second and fourth shot buttons.

Once finished, continue through the settings menu using the middle button till you reach exit menu.

F18SB Pre-infusion Settings Menu

Turning Pre-infusion on

To enable the pre-infusion mode on your Sanremo F18SB, enter the settings menu by holding down the middle button on the left hand group head until you see heating cup. Scroll through the settings menu using the fourth shot button from the left until you reach ‘pre-brewing’, which contains your pre-infusions settings. You can either enable or disable it by going left and right with shot buttons 1 and 5 and continue using the middle button.

Adjusting Pre-infusion Time

How pre-infusion works on the SB is by starting the shot for a select number of seconds, pausing for another few seconds, then resuming the shot again. So, for example, you could adjust your pre-infusion settings to be on for three, off for five, for a total of an eight second pre-infusion.

You can adjust the amount of pre-brew time up and down by 0.1 seconds using shot buttons 1 and 5, then continue on through to the next page using the middle button. You can have two separate pre-brewing programmes, one for the single shot buttons and one for the double shot buttons, and they’ll be copied across onto all of the group heads.

Turning Pre-infusion off for individual buttons

Pre-infusion is globally set to either ‘enable’ or ‘disable’. You can’t turn off pre-infusion for a specific button, but you can adjust a button to have a pre-infusion time of 0 seconds which accomplishes the same thing. So let’s say you only want pre-infusion for button 1 – simply enable pre-infusion globally in the settings, and adjust buttons 2, 3, 4, and 5 to have 0 seconds of pre-infusion.

F18SB’s Automatic Backflush Cleaning Cycle

At the end of every shift or when you’ve got a bit of down time, you’ll want to perform a backflush of your F18SB to deep clean the inside of the grouphead with a little cleaning chemicals. To start the backflush cycle for a single group head, simply hold down the middle shot button and tap the left-most shot button.

Before you get started, make sure you’ve brushed down the shower screen and placed some espresso machine cleaning powder into your blank portafilter disk. Hold down the middle and tap the left shot button to start the backflush sequence which will pulse on and off for a few minutes. Then repeat this process for the other group heads before powering off the machine for the day.

You can also set the machine to deep clean all of the group heads at the same time. First, make sure your cleaning powder and blanks are loaded into the group heads. Then, enter the settings menu by holding down the middle shot button on group head one. Tap through the menu until you see cleaning cycle ‘no’, and press the left or right button to get it to say ‘yes’.

Start the programme using the middle shot button and it will enter cleaning mode which will take a few minutes and can not be interrupted. Once cleaned, it will pause before performing a rinse cycle, at which point you should remove the blanks and place your normal basket back in before pressing the middle shot button to commence the rinse cycle.

After a few minutes the rinse cycle will finish, then simply tap back through to exit the settings menu.

Can You Change the Temperature on the Sanremo F18 SB?

Adjusting the temperature is not a feature that is offered on the F18 SB, with a fixed boiler temperature that supplies the steam wands and brew boilers which is typically set between 120-125 degrees celsius. The water cools down slightly on its way to the group head, providing a constant stable brew temperature.

Adjusting the brew and steam temperature is not something that all barista will need to do, but for those that are interested in adjustable temperatures, they should look to Sanremo’s more premium coffee machines including the F18, Café Racer, and Opera.

What did we miss?

If there’s anything you still need to know about the F18SB Single Boiler from Sanremo, let us know what we missed so we can answer your query and update this article accordingly – Contact Us.