HB wrote:
This issue has been a real struggle: How to handle answering the already asked question for the 100th time?
My strategy is posting links to previous discussions, referencing the FAQs, and sometimes merging the repeated question into the previous incantation with a marker "...merged with existing thread on same topic..." The keys to retaining my sanity while doing this sort of bookkeeping are (a) recognizing that resurfacing old discussions frequently leads to new insights, and (b) using my reply referencing previous discussions as an opportunity to draw them together or elaborate on a point that may not have been raised before.
This certainly helps, but truth be told, stuff changes, or at least our perception of it does.
This reminds me of the old joke about the opening lecture at medical school, where the dean gets up, addresses the new class, and starts out by saying, "50 percent of what you will learn here is incorrect. The only problem is, we don't know
which fifty percent."
To give but one example, this site is full of excellent machine reviews done by Dan in a style no one else has equalled on any other site. As good as these reviews are, they are flawed, or at least most of them are flawed, in my view, by the fact that Dan uses or at least
used 18+g doses (like the rest of us) when he was testing these machines. Some of us, certainly myself, have concluded that none of these machines was really designed to use such large doses, and the fact that a machine basically
barfs on 18 or 20g doesn't necessarily tell you anything about the machine when used as it was designed to be used, with
Italianate doses of more like 12 to 15g in a double basket.
The Cimbali Jr. review reflects the same observation that I had with the same machine, i.e. it is not easy to use for someone who isn't experienced in basket preparation. This observation led me to modify this machine with a pressure regulator and a delay timer, which cut down on the problems. I'm pretty sure now that this mod was unnecessary had I been using doses for which the machine was designed, and I'm equally sure that had Dan tested it with 12 or 14g doses, he would have come to a different conclusion on its usability.
an aside: when Jim Schulman was here visiting recently, I pulled some simultaneous paired shots for him on my two Juniors, one made with 14g and the other with 18 or 19g. I switched back and forth as to which machine pulled which shot, so both vibe and rotary pulled both 14g and 18-19g shots. It was fascinating to watch the comparison, in real time. The machines basically "rejected" the overdosed shots, and reacted with noises and violent foaming. The appearance of the shots immediately after they were pulled were so dramatically different, that had I tried to blind taste them I would be unable to be objective since the difference in the appearance was so obvious.
I only picked this example because I am intimately familiar with it. But I'm sure there are hundreds or more likely thousands more examples of stuff being said here that appeared to be correct at the time but later was shown likely to not be correct.
Short of spending time that no one has available to update all this stuff, not just reviews but many posts and many threads, I think one is always stuck with having to interpret postings as maybe being correct in the light of what was known at a particular time, but this espresso stuff changes just like medical knowledge does, over time.
ken
