My experience from pouring these every day for the last ~seven years is that it doesn’t really matter that much. I make a divot in the coffee bed so the bloom water can penetrate deeply and then try to saturate evenly using the pour.
I find if I don’t swirl at all the bed ends up either with a weird dome shape which is supposedly bad, or completely uneven and with big cavernous holes in it, which seems like a result of something similar to channeling. It seems like just a very small amount of swirling is enough to prevent this, though. Generally I don’t swirl at all for the bloom.
I’ve also been pouring smaller amounts at a time, e.g. for a 15g dose, I’ll usually do 45g bloom, then pour ~30g of water at a time, let it drain until the bed is just visible, pour 30g more, etc.
This generally takes longer, I guess because if there’s less weight of water pushing the water through it drains a little slower? But in general a grind that will take ~3 minutes pouring 3x/7x/7x (I think that’s the standard Rao method?) will take 5-6 minutes. I don’t think this is actually improving my coffee any noticable way, I think I just feel like if I’m “doing” more it must be “better.”
Case in point: I switched back to the Ethiopia today from the ES that I’d dialed in at 5M. Couldn’t remember which grind setting I liked previously (should have marked it) and tried for 6A. Definitely way overextracted it. I could taste it ever so slightly up front, but the coffee was still very good during the open and middle. The finish was really bitter which always seems to be the most revealing part. Specialty coffee prepared with good gear and technique appears to be unique–perhaps forgiving is a better term–in this regard in that you can way OE or UE and still get something drinkable.
You don’t need to calibrate unless you’re having problems or want to push your grind range in a certain direction. Since I don’t grind for espresso at all, I pushed my zero point closer to the grinder’s lowest setting in an attempt to bring French press grind into play. The Baratza factory default is 2Q, which means that every setting below that is beyond the touch point of the burrs. Doesn’t mean that you can’t grind finer than 2Q, but you wouldn’t want to let it run at that setting for any significant amount of time, especially with no beans in the chamber.
I think the dome is fine. Some respected coffee people recommend it.
Weird V60 hack: Once you get all the water in, if you gently stir the slurry CCW (probably clockwise too but I haven’t tested) and get a spin going, it will produce a beautiful dome. I find that very odd.
I agree that this seems bad, but it basically never happens to me unless something is broken. In fact, I can recall exactly two times it was issue: the first was when I was starting out and put the upper burr carrier back into the grinder wrong, and second time was when one of the plastic burr carrier flanges broke. Would definitely suspect a grind quality issue if it ever happened again.
Yeah this is why. I think it can make a difference but there are so many other things changing when you do this that I’m not sure which one(s) are affecting the outcome. I’ve settled on one continuous pour after the bloom for repeatability and consistency. I’d lay odds against me being able to blind identify different V60 methods. Maybe I could identify the odd one out in triangle tests, but as far as consistently calling out multi-pours vs single pours specifically, I’m very skeptical that anyone could do that.
I’ll probably do this by roaster/method/etc once 2021 is actually over but this is a preview of my home brewing for 2021.
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so i had this nespresso ‘limited release’ pod that was labeled fruity and it was, well, extremely fruit. like full on cherry gummy fruity. I kinda liked it, but I was wondering - is that’s how ‘fruity’ specialty coffee taste like (not quality wise, but taste notes)?
Was this a flavored coffee? Specialty coffee can definitely taste like candied fruit. The candy fruit flavors are usually natural process coffees, especially Ethiopian naturals. Are there any good coffee shops in your area? Could just pop in and ask for a candied fruit natural.
i wrote that it wasn’t flavored at first but trying to read their gibberish page left me confused and it’s literally calle forest fruit flavor, so probably yes?
https://www.nespresso.com/us/en/order/capsules/original/forest-fruit-flavor-espresso-pods
A juicy flavored coffee bursting with the aromas of berries straight off the forest floor, enveloped by a festive sweet pastry note.
I agree that their corporate gobbly-gook is difficult to parse but seems like this means it’s a flavored coffee. It would be really bizarre to describe an unflavored coffee as a flavored coffee imo. I can’t even imagine the type of horrible Karens they must employ to write bullshit like this:
ORIGIN
Taste the forest in a celebration of shade-grown coffees from Colombia and beyond. Exotic wood and spice notes dance through this enchanting espresso.
in grinder news, it looks like baratza upgraded the Vario, the new Vario+ looks like a pretty good upgrade and it’s a LOT cheaper than the Forte. Not really sure of all the nitpicky differences.
Not gonna give it a go with Vietnamese coffee? They’re the second largest exporter in the world.
Also my family loves using a Keurig for their coffee. They just don’t know what they’re missing. Even an aeropress would be a huge upgrade.
The major upgrades are good (metal grind chamber, new rocker arms and metal knobs), but what I find weird is that only the Vario W+ ($599) comes with the steel burrs. Seems like they are kind of missing the mark here, because what’s really needed is a cheapest barebones brew grinder to compete with the Fellow Ode. If they could have done the non-weight version with the single-dose hopper for $499, I think that could have been an Ode killer.
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Rehashing our discovery from this thread on the Vario being the stone cold nuts in case someone is looking to get a grinder:
The magic is that the internals of the unit (and the Forte) are machined to a ridiculously good tolerance which has runout that’s very close to zero. In other words, the lower burr (the spinning part) doesn’t have much “wobble” around its axis and spins true, so then all you need to do is hyperalign the burrs to get an almost-perfect cutting geometry. This in addition to the cutting surface design of the steel burrs produces a very consistent particle size distribution (this is important for isolating tasting notes from specialty brew coffees).
To perform hyperalignment, most people would tear down an old Vario and replace the plastic grind chamber with the metal one from the Forte, push the burr faces together using the lever arms, and then screw it all down into place perfectly flush. Now the metal grind chamber is already included in the new Vario so you don’t have to order that part ($50) or swap it out (about an hour of work). The other method for hyperalignment (my method) is to shim the upper with metal foil until the cutting surfaces clear evenly.
Anyway, the point is that you will be able to achieve an alignment that is comparable to the highest-end commercial machines. That’s important if you’re trying to isolate delicate notes in brewed coffees, especially pourover coffee. It’s probably overkill if you drink darker roasts or do French / Aeropress. This grinder is a known quantity though as the Vario line has been in production for well over a decade now. Super reliable and world-class alignment, and the most you have to pay for that is $599.
so with the upgrades to the vario+, the only advantages for the Forte BG are steel burrs and a slightly more powerful/faster motor?
So somehow I got the impression that the forte ceramic burrs were better for pour over but the discussion in here got me to do some more research.
Apparently the ceramic burrs have a design that produces a bimodal grind distribution while the steel will be more consistent.
I’ve ordered the steel burrs and will perform the swap when they get here but in the meantime I also got my hands on a Kruve sifter.
I ground 20g of beans at the 6Z setting. 6Z should be a medium grind setting so I ran the grinds through the 800 micron sieve. About 5.1g passed through the sieve and visually, they looked MUCH finer than 800. Having a good chunk of fines makes a lot of sense assuming the bimodal distribution.
I then brewed the remaining 15g using my recipe, scaled down slightly of course. The results were some of the best pour over I’ve had in some time! A little bit under extracted but the fruitier notes were there.
I think the more consistent grind size with the steel burrs will help. And if not I think there might be some interesting “recipe” experiments to be had by separating and recombining different grind sizes in various ratios.
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Also the touchscreen and metal cover / housing. There may be some other minor differences, not sure.
Yeah the ceramic produces more fines and is thus preferred for espresso. When you get the steel burrs you’ll want to hyperalign them using the Alicorn method (or the shim method). Are you familiar with the procedure?
I’d love to have a Kruve just for diagnosing / calibrating grind but never wanted to pay that much. However, just regular grade lab sieves are arguably more expensive and not designed specifically for coffee so Kruve actually seems like a deal from that perspective. One of the things I’ve complained about a lot here is no standardization to compare grind sizes in specialty coffee. I did come up with a DIY option that would be cheaper for people here (about $30 for a set of meshes that do coffee grind range) but there’s a fair amount of tinkering involved with that.
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I think I’ve heard the technique described broadly. It’s shimming with tin foil to get perfect alignment or something right?
And yeah the kruve kit was a little expensive. But I’ve got more money than sense and typically like a made for purpose solution than trying to cobble something together.
Like 8 years ago I tried pvns drill powered hario hand grinder solution. Melted some plastic somehow and that was the last time I tried a homemade coffee gadget
I suppose there are truly three different methods for setting alignment. The first (and maybe best) is called the Alicorn method which was popularized on home-barista. It’s a bit complicated and by no means foolproof. You have to disassemble the machine and remove the grind chamber (it’s not that bad if you are mechanically inclined), then you use the adjustment levers to push the two burr faces together completely flush, aligning them perfectly. With that alignment in place, you tighten the mounting screws down “locking” it to perfect alignment. The actual procedure is more complicated but that’s the relevant part. In my opinion, it’s not actually that easy to do or understand and I wasn’t able to get an alignment this way. You can see the process in this (bad) video:
Next method is using foil shims under the upper burr. I was able to get nearly perfect alignment with this method with one small piece of tin foil. Some people expressed concerns that this could cause “taco burr syndrome” (TBS), i.e., the burr microbending around the shim, but that seems rather unlikely to me. You do not need to disassemble the grinder to perform this method.
Final method I know about is the unofficial Baratza one that involves using Loctite on the screws and over/under tensioning them to alter the alignment. Same concerns I’ve read about over-tensioning leading to TBS which there is little to no evidence for afaik. However, altering the alignment with screw tensioning seems like it would be really finnicky.
The reason I went with the shim method is because that’s what pros use to align some of the big time grinders like EK43. There’s a video of Matt Perger (and others) doing exactly this, so it seemed good enough for me on a much cheaper Baratza. The other method to align an EK43 is send it to some dude in Europe who machines the burr / carrier to ultra low tolerance. Foil is way cheaper.
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