At the moment I’m making aeropress. But ordering some v60 stuff now I have the Forte grinder.
Aeropress seems weird. Like all the recipes I see online seem to call for lots of water and lots of time. But experience tells me that anything more than about 50 grams of water or 25 seconds leads to over extraction. Maybe I’m doing something completely wrong.
I’d start with Hoffman and go from there:
Tried it this morning and did okay. But need to adjust the grind.
I think I’ve figured out what going on.
Previously I’d been doing
And occasionally getting okay coffee. But never great. (Also. Low quality grinder)
I guess this recipe gets a lot of extraction out of a lot of beans fast. More similar to an espresso (which is what some of the AP design seemed to suggest)
The Hoffman recipe. Has less beans, finer grind, cooler water and a lot more time. Probably going to end up in about the same place but with a lot more control. I.e. I can change the time, temperature or grind and get greater gradations of flavor. This recipe requires less precision to get a good result.
Looking forward to messing around with it.
On the other hand. After my first attempt.
Mrs Rugby: “so you spent $1000 on a grinder and made my coffee worse?”
There are many techniques, but Aeropress grind is generally finer than V60, so you’re almost certainly grinding way too coarse. What grind setting did you use on the Forte? And have you switched the burrs yet?
Yeah. Definitely need to make much finer. I think it’s a 7 something. Probably will take it to a 5N and start from there.
Haven’t changed the burrs yet. Going to do that after I work up the courage.
The steel burr profile is significantly better for filter. Also, changing the burrs is pretty straightforward, but I should offer a few tips in advance. First, there are a few things that are considered good practices on the Vario/Forte lines.
(1) Don’t change the grind adjustment mechanisms unless the motor is running.
(2) Don’t turn the machine upside down.
There are exceptions to these but let’s just assume you aren’t going to violate them for now. Now here are tips for changing the burrs.
(1) Use the correct size flathead screwdriver.
(2) In general, exercise caution with the screws. You might end up doing a lot of screwing (!) for alignment, so don’t wanna strip anything with haphazard technique. When torquing the screws down to final tightness, I recommend holding the metal shaft of the screwdriver only, not the handle. You can torque firmly with this method since the max torque you can apply will be small. You want to avoid over-tightening because that can deform the burrs around the screws.
(3) Once the burrs are removed, completely clean inside the grind chamber and upper burr carrier of coffee grounds. The mounting surfaces need to be perfectly clean from debris to avoid borking your alignment.
(4) When you’re changing the bottom burr, you’ll notice that it doesn’t fit perfectly into the center of the lower burr carrier (I’m assuming this is true and hasn’t changed). Instead. there’s some play between the edge of the burr and the sweeper arms. Do your best to center it when torquing it down. My trick is to shim between the burr and the sweeper arms with strips of business cards to hold it in place.
Here is the official video for proper reference:
Yeah this pack is insanely fast.
For this recipe I used 95C water, grinding on 7H with a 2Q touch point, 20g coffee, 60g bloom for 45 seconds, and then pour the next 240g water quickly, give one swirl when done pouring and wait. Total time including the bloom was like 2:20
Back in business. I received one of the sweet chrome switch plate models. This thing is built like a tank, but it’s shockingly quiet in operation. I mean it’s way quieter than the Vario which isn’t all that loud.
Of course I had to brew a cup immediately this morning. I went back to this Honduras pacamara from B&W that I’ve struggled mightily with. No calibration or testing, just set the grind size to min (1) and let it rip. Was able to fit exactly 22g of huge pacamara beans in the hopper neck above trap door. Did not hear burrs touching so doesn’t seem to be zeroed. To the naked eye, the particles looked consistent and spherical. Would estimate the average particle size is somewhere between 600 and 800 um.
Tasting notes on this washed medium roast coffee are black currant, sweet orange, and baking spices. I’m only getting orange, but it’s huuuge. Very sweet, like the juice squeezed from a ripe orange and with a body similar to OJ as well. Would not describe it as delicate or transparent. It finishes with a bitter aftertaste, same as it did on the other grinders. Not sure if it’s OE or if that’s the “baking spices,” but I’m starting to suspect that’s a property of this coffee and not something I was doing.
I’ll do a tear down and deep cleaning at some point along with analysis on retention and particle distribution. I’m not terribly sure how you’d approach aligning ghost tooth burrs so might have to think about that a bit.
Range on these is 1 to 10 with half clicks, so 20 total grind settings. Strongly suspect this isn’t zeroed out at the lowest setting. I prepared a sample ground at 5.0 with some old beans and it was pretty enormous, but check out this distribution and grind quality factor (*assuming the app is correct):
That’s an absolutely insane grind quality at that level of coarseness. However, an aspect of buying some ancient piece like this that obviously came from an estate sale / liquidation where you really have no idea what you’re getting is that the previous owner ran a ton of flavored coffee. It absolutely reeks of hazelnut.
can I see some more of these graphs somewhere? Like I want to see “grocery store blade chopper”, “cheapest electric conical burr grinder”, “hyperaligned baratza” etc. Show me the results from one of those $100k drum grinders.
I dunno, seems like Gagne went full Patreon and has it content locked there. I ain’t payin’ for no Patreons lol. I remember he got a 1.81 with his Weber EG-1 and a 1.75 with a known good EK43 while hitting about 1.5 on the Forte. I’ll keep posting these for grinders that I own though and other samples I acquire. Already took the shots for some Maxwell House which, in theory, should beat all of this stuff. However, I’ll also say that I don’t 100% trust that this app is doing good work yet. That’s why I picked up the Maxwell House preground.
No Egyptian art on the stem. Can you take it back?
That’s only on the Fuji Royal branded model sold in Japan. This is the American rebadge built for Jericho (out of business). Looks like Kalita High Cut is another rebadge. Eventually I may try to import a Fuji if this turns out to be a winner. You should start lobbying for the counter space right now.
(I tried to convince jwax to buy this because it was located sort of near him and could maybe avoid the high shipping costs for a killer deal. Turns out he does not command that kind of counter real estate in his kitchen.)
DEEP CLEAN in progress. This hazelnut stench gonna be tricky to remove. I might have to take two showers tonight.
The back burr cleaned up ok. Maybe after I run some rice / Grindz and then coat it with good coffee it’ll be fine.
These cast burrs are huge. Measured the back at 91mm and the front at 85/86mm. You can see it has a D-shaft motor which is the good choice and one that Baratza later switched to. Overall build quality is just crazy compared to consumer grade equipment. The grind adjustment piece is a heavy stainless screw-in with an NTN bearing attached to reduce friction from the spinning burr carrier (pic below). I think I’ll rotate the back burr when I put it back in under the theory that the lower part gets more action due to gravity. Dunno if that’s how it works but it makes sense to me.
After cleaning, I calibrated the lowest setting to just a hair above chirp and it’s grinding considerably finer now. I have no idea how to align this thing though or if alignment even makes sense in the same way for ghost tooth burrs. I guess mark the tops of the teeth and go from there. I brewed my V60 this morning with the finest possible grind. It looked and behaved much finer than my normal grind for a 22g dose, and it tasted that way too. It seems like the finest grind I can produce would probably work for a tiny V60, like 12g to 15g range, which is nice because (the very few) people who owned this grinder were saying it couldn’t go that low. I bet they didn’t calibrate down to the epsilon point.
Oh, before I forget (regarding alignment): Putting this thing back together and trying to determine how hard to torque the screws down reminded me of this:
Welp something got borked between cleaning and reassembling. Here’s a grind analysis of what I thought was in the Chemex range but looks more like press:
Not sure what’s going on here. Too many variables to track, but it could just be the beans themselves. That 1.75 quality I got was different (old) beans. Then I got a 1.46 on 3.5 with a third bean. These are all coffees from the Americas though, no dense Africans.
Really starting to think the grind quality is related to either humidity or how much CO2 is still in the beans. That first one that ground beautifully on the J500 was really old, stale coffee. These newer histograms are coffees that are very recently off roast and are degassing a lot in the cone. I’ve been searching to see if anyone has done this experiment or noticed such a thing, and so far this is all I’ve found:
I’m not sure what to make of these. Second guy is grinding for espresso, but his humid profile is not one I want to replicate (looks like there are more particles of all sizes contributing to total grind which is opposite of what I want). See here:
https://miro.medium.com/max/2400/1*gaB1gcEqf-li6_pbYG6AHA.jpeg
Both he and Hoffman show a difference in coarseness from humidity, but maybe that’s just due to off-gassing the CO2 and not the humidity effect. There’s a paper I’ve probably linked before that found grinding frozen beans produced tighter grind distribution, but I dunno if anyone out there has completely solved this yet.
The great thing about needing stale coffee for an experiment is that there’s ton of it on your local supermarket shelf.
