Coffee: we drink it or we get angry.

I've plugged Bar Nine before, but with nitrogen flushing and free US shipping now, it's hard to beat and less expensive than the local roaster down the street. I can now get my light roasted West Coast fix at a reasonable price. @CEE TEE and I have been brewing the bag pictured below over the past week. At normal proportions on pour over, this lot is a very pleasant and balanced brew. As CEE TEE discovered, if you up the the ratio to about 13.5:1, you get a nice and clean lemon like acidity to the coffee that's best cut with a little water post brew.

I'm excited to have my West Coast coffee fix up here in Connecticut!

 

In the coffee world, I usually get to know someone and what they like before I fully recommend something to a person. While I fully recommend Bar Nine overall, the the coffee in my photo is a far more nuanced and subtle coffee than many people may normally care for. If you predominately like things bold and interesting in your line up, this is not the coffee for you, but some of their others may be.

It can be very forward if you up the proportions though. The acidity will hit you head on while transitioning into a nice dark chocolate bite while not venturing into sour land.

 

@ButtUglyJeff I kept the grind the same size as I normally do for a pour over. I prefer the extraction with 15-16:1, but was a little surprised that it was still very palatable at 13.5 when cut with water after. Also, the coffee is very light, somewhere between 60-65 Agtrons, and very dense.

Edit: Still playing with the grind size on this bag. I'm thinking of keep it at 15:1 and going slightly finer than normal on a paper filter next.

 

Taking a queue from the old tip to replace fire dectector batteries at the new year, I now use a little of my free time at the holidays to care for my boilers and clean the espresso paths on my machine. A full descale of both boilers and an espresso path clean go a long way to making sure my machine is making tasty shots and will run for years to come.

Still rocking Klatch Belle espresso as my main bean!

 

@thegunner100 Awesome choice on the Lido! The Lido makes about as clean of a grind distribution as the best conical burr grinders out there. (I have a graph a few pages back that you may have seen.) Even with the new handgrinders, such as handground, I still feel as if the Lido is king. Where I work now has the cheap Krupps grinder that Starbucks sells, which drove me away from brewing coffee at work. Occasionally, I'll bring the Lido into work, but it does get odd looks from the coworkers.

And the combo with an aeropress will make one killer cup of work coffee!

 

@thegunner100 I hope this isn’t too long and is what you’re looking for.

If we were to grind coffee in a perfect world, we would probably try to achieve a single uniform grind size, i.e. every single particle is exactly 500 microns. We obviously cannot do this, so when grinding coffee, the goal is to have all of your particles as close to your target grind size as possible. That is, if we want a coarse grind, say 1000 microns, we try to get as many particles as we can to the 1000 micron target with a mostly even distribution of particle sizes.

Typically, the main reason for upgrading a home grinder is to achieve a more even grind size distribution. Even grind size distribution is accomplished primarily by the following: the grinding burrs and the bearing/ shaft the burrs are mounted to. Cheap burrs can wear out quickly and may not produce an even grind distribution. Additionally, if there is play in the bearings/ shaft that the burrs are secured to, there will be variation in grind size. Burr cleanliness is probably the next largest factor following these. Motor speed/ size can also affect grind distribution.

The even distribution is key here. With cheap, worn, or dirty grinders, this normal distribution will go away. The particle distribution graph may look fairly flat or it may look a little like a sine wave. When things go awry with a decent grinder, the distribution will mostly peak at the target grind size, but will also have a second, smaller, peak in the fines area.

All three of the undesirable scenarios discussed above will create a less than perfect cup of coffee. It can even make the brewing process difficult. If there are too many fines, filters may plug in the brewing process resulting in something such as an Aeropress that is hard to push down. The cup may taste silty with too many fines. Often times it can taste bitter and sour from over extraction due to the increased surface area, etc.

With a good grinder that’s clean, you should see a particle distribution like the one of my OE Lido below (measurement done by myself using laser diffraction):



From home-barista.com, here’s a comparison of three different grinders targeting the same grind size of about 450 microns:



In this graph we can see that the Ditting KR805 does a great job, but it’s $2500, while the Vario doesn’t do as great of a job, but is only $480 in comparison.

I wish I had some graphs laying around of what a bad grinder looks like and what a good grinder looks like when it gets dull or dirty.

…let’s not venture into the land of espresso grinders, because it gets a little different with things like bimodal particle distributions becoming desirable, and I’m not very knowledgable in that area.

Edit: Dropbox is blocking SBAF!