Jacob wrote:He he, except from the importance of a good grinder, I can't think of any coffee related truth that I would try to convince you or anybody else about.
Back then, over a year ago, it were statements like Chris Tacy's that Marshall and most other people had to rely on when placing early orders.
With my limited experience, I have to rely on an 'expert' from time to time. Just a few weeks before the Titan-project was launched, I trusted Greg Scace's experience and found myself a used Robur - pretty pleased with that!
The world is full of "experts," and one has to decide what to do with what they say. Without a doubt, if one knows nothing or next to nothing about a subject, it is more difficult. The more one knows about a subject, the more one can evaluate what "the experts" say.
Let me give you an example from outside the world of coffee. Robert Parker is a well known authority on wine. He produces a newsletter on wines, and either he or other members of his staff evaluate a fairly large percentage of the wines that are exported throughout the world. Like any human being, he has his own set of likes and dislikes, about which (I believe) he has been relatively consistent, which is to say that the man has a "track record." Do I blindly follow his recommendations, purchasing only wines he recommends and avoiding those he does not? No, I don't. I tend to find his recommendations on red Bordeaux and red Southern Rhone wines to be useful, and his evaluations of wines from other regions less similar to my own taste (and hence, less useful to me). This is because I've had the opportunity to compare his views on a given wine with my own. Another example more relevant to coffee would be that I've found, over time, that when Jim Schulman recommends a particular coffee to me, that I will like it and will be glad later that I bought it. This has been proven to me a number of times.
Before I am going to accord "expert" status, or more specifically, "expert status" that I'm going to follow, I need to convince myself that what this person finds to be "true" matches my own overall view of reality. As anyone who has read many of my postings can attest, I tend to be fairly skeptical about claims that appear "unsupportable." I have, myself, conducted a number of blind tasting experiments because I KNOW how easy it is to convince one's self of things that later prove to be incorrect.
For example, I have trouble believing that anyone can detect differences in the taste of espressos that are brewed at temperatures differing by 0.1 degree Fahrenheit, and that liquid dish soap leaves a tastable residue on glassware and portafilters regardless of how much you try to wash it off. Both of these are claims that have been made in the past by the individual that you reference. I should add that the accuracy of the temperature probe used by the GS3 does not even have a stated accuracy of anywhere close to 0.1 degree F, putting further into doubt anyone's claims that they can taste differences in coffee brewed to temperatures differing by such a small amount.
Most people whose taste and recommendations I value tend to be rather circumspect about their own judgments and they constantly question them, always considering the possibility that they might have made an error. I have not observed that sort of behavior in the person that you reference.
Therefore, I believe that what he has written about the GS3 is unlikely to accord very well with what I would observe for myself, were I to have the opportunity to test the machine, myself, over an extended period of time. I should add that any short term evaluation of this or any other machine could and probably would be misleading, given the variability inherent in espresso production, when one is comparing to another machine with which one has long term experience.
ken
. It is an interesting problem that I have not heard other accounts of so again, could it simply be a lemon machine that slipped through the cracks? Time will tell. These are the problems faced by many early adopters of technology, what we like to call the bleeding edge in the IT field.
