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Need a little guidance on grinding (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 4 months ago by Bronzie@sh.itjust.works to c/coffee@lemmy.world

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Morning Gentlepeople.

As a coffee newbie I am having some small issues while trying to improve my game. I have a Oracle Touch and subscrube to a local monthly coffee delivery, so my beans change weekly.

My issue is that the grind setting is incredibly different from bean to bean. With my last bag, grind 14 gave a perfect 1:2,5 ratio. With a different bean today, I had to discard two cups before learning that grind size 3 gave me the same ratio. 14 gave me 1:3,5 which tasted rubbish.

The problem is that I got channeling and very little crema.

I guess the questions are: do different beans require completely different ratios or am I doing something very wrong?
Should I accept a very high ratio to avoid channeling on certain beans?
Or should my timer be lower on certain beans?

Thanks in advance for any help and have a great cup this morning!

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[–] evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

The short answer is that there are a lot of variables, so your process has to be dialed in per bean, which is why most people end up just sticking with 1 type of beans.

Different roast levels are going to have different densities. Different bean varieties (and localities) are going to have different density and size. The age of the bean comes into play as well.

Some variables affect the actual brewing, others affect how the beans grind. Every once in a while, i'll have a bean that just seems to make more fines for whatever reason. I guess it's just down to the stiffness of the bean and the size.

If you want to be able to switch beans at will, you'll need to keep notes for each variety, and adjust back and forth as needed.

I don't think you'll be able to get a new bean right on your first shot no matter how you try to adjust. If you adjust for one variable, there's still all the others.

[–] viking@infosec.pub 1 points 4 months ago

James Hoffman has a great video (or even series I believe) on "dialing in" espresso machines, definitely worth watching.

That's also my key criticism with buying subscription coffee, often they send quantities that are too small to get to a meaningful brewing routine. I've had a gifted subscription for 150g monthly, and I was going through 30-40g just perfecting the output. So by that time I was left with enough coffee for 2 weeks and had to resort to alternative sources.