Baratza Vario Coffee Grinder Manual - Espresso Newbie Guide
This addendum to the printed Baratza Vario Manual is unofficial, from our practical hands-on experience, and we hope you find it useful for dialing in your grinder for making your espresso!
We will approach this in step-by-step fashion:READ THE BARATZA VARIO MANUAL - it's well written, and it will tell you how to use, and adjust the timing on the presets, it explains the functions, and has much, much VERY good information - it doesn't tell you how to make coffee, but it DOES tell you how to run and care for the machine!
Do NOT attempt to remove the portafilter hook from the portaholder. The hook itself is not adjustable, and it is difficult to reinstall the screw and stainless steel strip as perfectly as the factory installed it - the ONLY adjustable part is the holder arm mechanism (you probably won't need to change it unless you have a really tall portafilter).
Once you have read the manual, the best thing to do first is to determine your grinder speed. Use fresh beans - the beans you intend to use every day. Don't use those stale, old, shouldabeen thrown away beans. Use the good ones that you intend to use to make espresso.
To determine the grinding speed, grind a known weight of beans, using the Manual function.
You can use either a scale, or a scoop to do this. A standard coffee measure scoop holds about 1 Tablespoon or about 7 grams of beans. 
If you use a scale, use 10 grams of beans (it will make the math easier!). 
Weigh your 10 grams of beans, pour into the empty hopper of the Vario. 
Set the Macro setting (on the right) at Espresso (all the way at the top). Set the Micro Setting in the center, 10 clicks up from the bottom. With the volume cup (not the portaholder) in place, using the manual function, press start and NOTE how long it takes to grind 10 grams of beans. Repeat this with your Micro Setting at 5 clicks from the bottom. 
NOTE how long it takes to grind 10 grams of beans. Repeat with the Micro Setting at 15 clicks from the bottom. NOTE how long it takes to grind 10 grams of beans. When you are finished with this you will have 3 times noted - one at 5 clicks, one at 10 clicks, and one at 15 clicks, for a total of 30 grams of beans ground on three different runs. Divide the total amount of beans by the total amount of time giving you grams per second. 
In our case, 30 grams of beans divided by 28 seconds total, for about 1.1 grams per second, without much variance in what is a fairly wide range of espresso grinds. Not enough speed variance to worry too much about. If you do not know your gram weight dose for your basket, you determine it by weighing the amount of coffee that your basket holds. We use the grounds from our speed test to make this determination. If you already know your basket dose amount all's the better! In this particular case, with a 5mm head space our basket would hold 14.5 grams.
(We have not used a La Pavoni in quite a while...don't laugh too hard at us as we discover that we were wrong on how much coffee to put in the basket...) We switched from using the grounds cup, to using the portaholder on the Vario. We proceed ahead, knowing our grind rate of 1.1 grams per second. From our calculations we set the timer, using 'Espresso mode' on the Vario as described in the manual, and proceed to grind with the Micro Setting in mid range. 
We fit it all into the portafilter basket, with lots of spillage & fly-by, go to the Europiccola, and with great difficulty lock in the portafilter and get a MAJOR CHOKE. 
Clean up. Start over. We think the difficulties of inserting the PF were due to overdosing, and that was the case...we reduced the timer by steps, again, until we could insert the PF with normal effort.
We used a leveling tamp only because we are trying to change only the grind, and keep all the other factors the same. Once we got our dose under control - if you know your dose for your basket this will not be an issue for you - we were able to fine tune the grind to get generally the pour we wanted. We settled into a 9.5 second grind, translating to nearly 10 grams in the basket on a Micro Setting of about 8 from the bottom. This was quite satisfactory for a nice shot, using the Europiccola. 
One thing we observed is that the Portaholder is more ideally designed and better fits the larger Portafilters. The small, vintage, 49mm La Pavoni PF is both shorter, and smaller in diameter, and even at the highest setting of the PF holder it doesn't 'sit' well by itself, and we found it a bit messy. You may want to experiment with different methods to corral the grounds.
We used our Doser Scoop, and it worked very well with very little mess or waste. 
This is a salient factor if you dose into the basket and not into the basket while it is in the portafilter. Most people have their own technique for dosing in this manner....yogurt cups or funnels, so obviously there is a wide range of custom approaches and preferences here. The main advice we can give for the actual usage of the grinder is that the Rosetta Stone is to determine your grinder speed.
Once you know that, it is much easier to adjust your dose amount in grams. Even when changing to a completely different system that we are unaccustomed to (the La Pavoni Europiccola) we had no trouble making adjustments to get the shot we wanted with the grinder speed information in hand. 
From our observations, on any particular day, if you start with 'yesterday's setting' for a given machine, using a known dose (time), it generally takes no more than 1 shot to fine tune the Micro Setting to your satisfaction.
The following video illustrates the culmination of our efforts of dialing in the Baratza Vario grinder for use with our vintage La Pavoni Europiccola:
Pulling the Baratza Vario ground shot with a Vintage La Pavoni Europiccola
