I used a real espresso maker for the first time last week in Austin. It was cool, but I think I just want big carafes of coffee because I consume a lot.
You might need one of the Grand models that can brew 60 oz (as opposed to 40 oz).
Iāve done two of these regrind tests now. The main takeaway is that the process takes forever, really works the motor hard, and probably isnāt appreciably different from a typical result Iād get (I didnāt A/B it with anything). So I wonāt be doing it anymore. However, thereās another thing I thought about, which is that my grinders profile quite differently, and these results maybe sit somewhere in the middle. So now Iām going to try splitting the dose for different grinders and recombining to see if I can āblendā the burr profiles. It seems overkill but there are properties of both burr sets I like, and sometimes I get coffees that I think would be best in between.
To recap burr profiles:
The 54mm Ditting flats in the Vario tend to produce high brightness, high clarity, and thinner tea-like body. Think pulp-free orange juice thatās just ripe enough.
The 90mm (?) Fuji cast ghost tooth burrs tend to attenuate the acidity slightly with a bump in sweetness, lose some clarity, and have slightly more body. Itās pretty much the same thing people report with the Ditting/SSP Lab Sweet cast burrs, so maybe has more to do with cast surface than geometry. Think pulpy orange juice that is very ripe.
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u got the sickness
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Iāve had my moccamaster for a few months, itās pretty good. I would not be able to identify it in a blind taste test compared to my v60 pours. I use it when I want to brew larger quantities (>36g) or when Iām running late in the morning. I can get it set up then walk the dog and itās done when Iām back.
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For Moccamaster owners, the only really important thing is that you descale it properly at the specified intervals since copper boilers will certainly take limescale over time, especially depending on your water chemistry. Use the products they recommend (Urnex) and certainly donāt use vinegar. This is the #1 part worth protecting since itās really the āengineā of the machine and would cost the most to replace. They can get pretty nasty:
They also recommend using a cleaner which is a different product that removes oils from parts that touch coffee, but IMO this isnāt quite as important as protecting your boiler.
Tip 1: Remove the filter from the basket as soon as youāre finished brewing and do a quick rinse on the basket.
Tip 2: Buy the cleaning products in advance. My recent experience is that they can be a bit difficult to track down due to being out of stock or whatever. You might also consider picking up a a box of Grindz or equivalent grinder cleaning tablets when you order cleaner.
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Brian Quan said in his latest Fellow Ode 2.0 video that he knows people who bought one Ode for each SSP 64mm burr set. That seems kind of crazy to me. I mean itās not like I needed another grinder, but at least my #2 is maximally different in terms of what it does. But also, I donāt understand why no one is making more 54mm flat sets for the Vario/Forte platform. Thatās a popular grinder and the market has proven that people are willing to throw money at replacement burrs. If Ditting could just do a 54mm Lab Sweet cast set for about the same price itās a guaranteed god damn hit.
yeah I would absolutely buy that
Did you all realize the Vario / Forte steel is considered to be a well-regarded (unimodal) espresso grinder? If youāre willing to go long at about 1:2.5 / 30s and give up some body, I doubt thereās really anything at the price point that would clearly beat it. Lance did a three hour stream pulling shot after shot against an EK and claims itās straight up better at this style. Prima blogged about it several years ago and a few other people have pulled it side by side with other stuff and said itās right there.
Oh if youāre looking for witchcraft I donāt think Iāve talked about this before, but I have done what Lance shows in this FRESH video he just dropped, even going a step further and sorting the seeds by size under the theory that food of different thickness cooks differently, and also supposing similarly-sized beans might grind more similarly. The problem that all of this is sort of a major pain in the ass, which is why I think I mentioned something before about potentially using static electricity to sort out fines and chaff since they seems to come off last in a staticky grinder. This really depends on the coffee though in my experience and is probably only worth doing sometimes.
Currently Iām brewing this Malawi SL-28 and it has an asbolute fuckload of silverskin that clearly affects the taste (although to be honest I donāt hate it). It comes out last as a little heap on top of the pile off the ghost burrs without RDT and I can mostly just scoop it off. Iāve never tried any of this blowing stuff and definitely not this ultra coarse ā blow ā regrind.
This is the plastic dosing cup I use for ghost burr grinding. Itās fairly small which is hard to tell in the photo. Not using RDT for this due to rust concerns on cast metal. You can see how the chaff mostly ends up on top of the pile as does some fine powder.
But even before that, the majority of it clings to the sides of this cup and I just scrape it off with my finger. I tried other cups that donāt cling at all so couldnāt remove most with a simple finger swipe. Some coffee is lost but itās mostly dusty fines, and you can see the scraped portion in the image below. Itās a bit deceiving because there isnāt as much bona fide coffee that I wanna brew here as there appears to be. By weight Iām removing only a few tenths of a gram total.
People have brewed with and without chaff and reported different results. Iāve brewed a number of these with and without scraping to compare. Anecdotally, coffees that tend to produce a lot of chaff (African naturals) can have a malty / soupy flavor if I leave everything in, but I canāt say with certainty that itās solely due to chaff since Iām removing a decent amount of powder in the process as well.
Anyway, my point is that there may be cases where youāll want to leverage static to your advantage. It may require testing different catch cups, but I canāt think of a simpler way to remove a large amount of fines and chaff than what Iām doing with this Fuji / Jericho. Comparatively, the Vario / Forte seem to be naturally low static by design and you rarely hear anyone complaining about these being messy.
The original Fellow Ode is notorious for static as are all Fuji grinders. My experience is that the Baratza Encore has significantly more static than the Vario. That covers most of us here I think.
how it feels in my mind when I tell yall about the last cuppa I brewed
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TIL that IBM made coffee grinders back in the early days.
yet another v60 technique
very interesting takeaways regardless of what you think of this particular technique:
- hoffman is on #TeamPlasticV60
- preheating the V60 did not have any quantifiable effect on TDS but DID have extremely large impact on flavor (TDS has always seemed a little questionable to me, on itās own I think itās pretty useless since it basically treats all components equally and it should be intuitively obvious that there are multiple compounds in coffee beans and theyāll have different effects on flavor)
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Thatās close enough to my current technique that Iām kind of creeped out by it. The clear plastic and opaque plastic brewers are different plastics and have slightly different specific heat values, which is something I learned when I was doing the thermal mass calculations. I donāt remember which oneās ābetterā but I several of the white ones.
more NOLA coffee joint reviews:
https://oldroadcoffee.com/ - open early, nice space lots of good seating), decent espresso
https://www.heycoffeeco.com/ - very small space, great espresso, good barista, nice bagel bakery next door
https://www.thebeangallery.net/ - forgettable, only redeeming quality is they were open earlier than anyone else
https://coffeesciencenola.com/ - OMG, this is it. this is the place. they serve espresso properly, roast in house, they have a sweet patio (with cats!), great all around except parking here is a total fucking pain in the ass.
https://www.churchalley.store/ wanted to try this but they were closed thursday and friday.
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Apollonās Gold is having a Black Friday sale which turns out to be a pretty good deal if you order enough coffee. Everything is discounted, and then if you hit 10,000 JPY (about $72) you get another 20% off. So I ended up adding six 250g bags of the cheaper non-gesha stuff to get there, and then shipping was about $14. Total was $72 for 3.3 lbs of coffee which is notbod. It ships from Tokyo but their recommended offgassing times are very long (between 1 and 2.5 months) so keep that in mind.
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