+1, I actually had worse results, and I believe stuck pots, when I tried sifting for siphon with a glass rod when I was using a false-burr Cuisinart grinder.

I heard someone was using a Kone to sift. I use mine as a china cap (strainer) for cooking recipes.

Mainly my sifting has been done with a fine mesh and that tends to leave more of the smaller particles behind... today I tried a side-by-side on a very coarse mesh (12g initial to 10g using a standard metal kitchen sieve) and found that there was still a slow draw down, but the resulting drink did taste quite a bit better: less acrid but also less oils.
I feel the kone would probably be too fine to do a dry sift, but may be suited to a cold rinse... the difficulty being in transferring grounds as the kone is quite a bit wider than most siphon openings.

I have just started trying sifting the ground, as suggested by a good barista. Good to see this title coming alive again. I used very simple sieve found in the cake making/ bakery corner in a department store. One is actually for shaking icing on cake.

I managed to sieve out very fine particles, about 6% of the ground. I examined the ground under a manifying glass, the finest may be 100th of a mm, some are bigger, when you are looking at them close enough, the variation of particle size is surprising big. I trust a better grinder will give a more even ground but there will be fine particles. After all the beans are crusted not cut into pieces. For fine particles, under this topic shall cover more than the cell wall fragments suggested by Jim's ( in 2009) post.

Sifting technically can remove small particle and reduce the range of particle size, and make the extraction more easy to control. All good brewings are just appropriate control of extraction.

My first trial give a cleaner cup. It is a good start as there is a way to separate the "too fine", i can push the limit by other setting. What came naturally to my mind is increase the steeping time and finer ground. I trust the direction is promising, just the implemantion is not that easy, i need a bit more trials.

I am thinking of different way to modify the brewing. Using different sieve, may be sieve only half of the ground, sieving of the oversize particles etc. One issue is you have to be quick, ground coffee don't like waiting.

I've got some crazy ideas floating around in my head about grind sifting, fines, and electrostatic charge. I was thinking of electrostatic precipitators and ion generators and inkjet printers to pull the finds electrostatically from the coffee and wandered into model train territory to find that they sift something called static grass and use a high voltage charge differential to get their grass to stand up in glue when they make their landscape. I ran across a few low-cost ion generator kits but I'm thinking now of taking a tennis racket shaped electronic flyswatter from Harbor Freight and putting in a sifting basket in the racket and removing the negative lead to attract the fines. It's said not to work as well as some higher powered units but it should be a low cost way to try this out and see what happens.

Anyone else thinking along these lines for sifting or getting rid of static in your grounds?

Once I used a cheap cuisinart conical burr grinder. It is similar to the Solis burr grinder but using high speed motor instead. The result is the ground spilled everywhere due to the electrostatic, I used a Zero Stat gun to neutralize the charges before pouring the ground out of the plastic containter.

May be I can try this and then sieve to see if it make any difference.

I bid on a zero stat gun on eBay but didn't bid high enough. I'd like to try one out, but not at the prices I've seen.

I'm afraid that my plan may apply a positive charge to all the coffee left behind which will result in the similarly charged coffee particles repelling each other and flying all over the place. That would not be good.

The zero stat is quiet expensive, I bought it not for coffee. I used it to help removing dust from photo film and vinyl record.
it works in 2 stages, you pull the trigger it release one type of ion, and when you release it (after a few second) release the other polarity. These ion will neutralize the electrostatic but not to charge a object it is not charged in the first place.
For the Cuicinart grinder I mentioned, if I use bean of darker roast, the ground would stick to the wall of the container, when I poured the ground out, the particales flew away due to repellion. If I pulled a few triggers with the zero stat, the ground could be shaken off the container wall, no more repellion.

I am not sure if it can remove charge on the fine or not. (The fine is so light that a tiny charge is enough to hold it firmly on larger particles.) Will test it out and come back.

Lately I've been struggling with pour-through times on the Kalita 185 Style set grinding fairly coarse with the Vario. I ended up building up a second, home sifter from two canning jars with the lids taped back-to-back and a paint strainer mesh and it made a big difference in the times. I'm not needing to do this with the finer grind of the Kalita 155 that I'm using to brew 12 grams of decaf, but for 30 grams in the 185 it makes an improvement. The Panama Elida Natural (Elida Reserve) I brewed this morning was very tasty.



Prior to this, when the pour started to look like it was going to take too long, I'd bypass brew by pouring under the filter, a bit tricky but still tasty.



I did switch from using 8 oz jelly jars to 4 oz jars because I don't need the capacity... but you could always use an 8 oz jar if you're using larger batches.

A question to those of you with some sifting experience: would 300 microns (#50) be about right? I've got a bead on a vintage sieve, and 300 seems close enough to what's usually talked about (e.g. ~250 microns). Thanks in advance for any help.

If you're sifting for anything besides espresso, 300 microns works great. Anything ~500µm+ ends up wasting a lot of coffee and makes achieving high extraction more difficult. (My 450 micron sieve eats up around 25% of the grinds)