I figured out that 300 lbs is for “fully broken in” on the 80mm 804 sets with a 15,000 lb expected lifespan. So if that 2% of the total lifespan applies to breaking in the 54mm steels, we’re looking at 26 to 44 pounds. I have no idea if 2% is the same, but it seems plausible. A full 44 pounds would be like 3 years of single dosing for me.
By the way, don’t use rice in your Baratza grinder, and especially not raw rice. That would definitely void warranties if something broke. I’m debating using parboiled in mine because off warranty and I don’t wanna buy who knows how many pounds of beans to waste seasoning this thing. Those Dittings are powerful and can handle it.
I ran about 6 lbs of old stale beans through when I got mine, and I do about a kilo/month more or less. So… 25lb/year? jesus. I guess for seasoning purposes darker roasts should have more of an effect than light roasts, shouldn’t they? They’re drier and hence harder? idk. plus even if that’s true it’s basically impossible to tell how much of a difference tehre is until we have billions of datapoints.
I give up
Lighter roasts are harder. I got a roast once from a dude who had just started a roasting business / coffee shop who had never done a light before (I bought an Ethiopian natural in his cafe and was stunned to find it was basically a Vienna roast when I got home). Returned it and he agreed to light roast whatever I wanted. It was so far under that it broke several motor poles in my Encore.
Are you able to get these huge French press style grinds on the coarsest setting?
I made a 10W reference sample and it’s nowhere close to this. Tell-tale sign the burrs aren’t broken in yet.
I picked up 3 lbs of “cheap” (like $5/lb) beans after running through the last 10 oz or so of stales I had laying around. If 3 lbs isn’t enough, I’m moving on to parboiled rice.
My grinds look like pvn’s on a similar setting
maybe I should re-calibrate. the chirp point is currently at 2Q or whatever they recommend. If I calibrate to have the touch point at 1E or so that would give me more coarseness at the other end, wouldn’t it?
I can’t really tell how coarse that is, but it seems coarser than mine with a zero at about 1J. I’ve been taking pictures of 10W results with a quarter as reference so I can go back and check later after this seasoning attempt. I just know that 5M is insanely too fine for a V60 on my machine.
Yes. Maybe we should all shoot for 1M though to make grind settings comparable. That’s the default Forte BG / Vario w/steel calibration now (2Q is ceramic). I’ve also read that some people were getting inconsistent grinds when they set 1A, and it was suggested that 1M is the factory setting for a reason (i.e., that going lower leads to inconsistency at the coarsest settings). No clue if that’s actually true though. I’ve noticed running this first 1.5 lbs of bad coffee through that it moved my chirp point down several notches because I’m grinding at the setting right above chirp. Started at 1M and it walked down to 1D.
Anyone else use an Encore Baratza and have grinds fling out every time you put the plastic piece back in? Holy shit this thing is messy.
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I’ve run 2 lbs of this 8 o’clock “medium” (it’s dark) roast through so far. The bag says 100% arabica, but I would have bet money that it’s cut with robusta. It smells like tobacco / burnt rubber. I tried to clean / vacuum the machine out and run some light roast through yet a ton of this stuff made it into my V60. The cone looks like 100% mud. I’m gonna have to disassemble the machine and clean it from inside out.
This was the only cost effective thing I could find locally. If I had it to do over again, I’d have looked online for a bulk light roast. Might still have to clean it once because grinding at the finest setting means that powder is gonna coat the inside of the machine.
Here’s a comparison of my Encore (L) and Vario (R) both fully coarse:
The left is a bit ridiculous but definitely closer to what I consider coarse. Baratza says the grind ranges on these max at 1200 microns and 1150 microns, respectively. Even if the picture is misleading due to the Encore having a worse distribution, it still doesn’t appear that they’re anywhere close in mean particle size.
After comparing with this photo,
I think my coarse grinds are probably about right, maybe a touch small. Encore has a tendency to let huge boulders through at the coarsest setting which makes visual comparison tough. Still can’t figure out what the problem is though. I’m getting way more ultra fines than I did a month or two ago. Currently putting about two pounds of parboiled rice through it to see if it chills out (don’t try this if you have a warranty). If that doesn’t improve things, I’ll tear it down again and inspect from the inside out.
Finally took a crack at Gagne’s program. I’m amazed at how well this works, but there are some issues on my end. First, the reference is obviously distorted so I need to do some work there. Second, it says the average particle is > 1.6mm (1,600 microns). That’s because I have some of the larger chunks too close and it’s counting them as one particle, so separating them well is going to be important.
That was a terrible picture taken with my phone, but it could potentially be amazing with a large lens camera mounted up in the right rig.
There’s an installer for Mac/Windows I think, but I had little trouble firing it from the terminal in Linux with python3. Just had to install a few missing packages. Lemme know if you can’t get it running.