Knowing that I owned a couple of new Cimbali Max grinders, plus had a couple of Cimbali planar burr grinders lying around, Dan Kehn asked me if I would do a comparison of these grinders for the Titan Grinder Project. This was a couple of weeks ago when I was up in Vancouver, Canada, on vacation, but we made arrangements with Larry of Rocket Coffee Roasters to send me a supply of his excellent coffee, for use in the comparison, which was performed last weekend. The first few paragraphs of this post deal with my own personal history with Cimbali grinders, and if you find the writing tedious, you can skip down a few paragraphs and pick up the story at that point.
Perhaps a little background would be useful before I get into the actual tasting procedure and results. My own home espresso adventures began around 15 years ago, when in short succession I owned several cheap steam and pump operated machines, none of which lasted very long. I was about to give up on home espresso when I was discussing this experience with a my favorite restauranteur in Vancouver, John Bishop, on a prior trip about 13 years ago. John suggested I buy a Cimbali Junior, and that if I bought it, the machine would last the rest of my life. On my way back home I stopped off at the now-long defunct, by appointment only, location of the Boise Cimbali dealer. The salesman there tried to talk me out of buying a Junior, saying it was overkill for a home (this was 1995); he insisted that I take a Domus and a small grinder home, and if I didn't want those after a few weeks, he'd take them back and order me a Junior. So I took the Domus home and a week later called the salesman and said I wanted the Junior and a matched grinder. Since I wanted the equipment in brass, I had to wait several months before it arrived. The brass Junior is the same (now-heavily modified) vibe pourover I still own today. Although I had ordered a Junior grinder, they sent a Cadet instead, which I got at the same price as I would have had to pay for the Junior since it was their error.
The Cadet grinder is basically a Junior grinder with autogrind and a larger bean hopper, the same grinder motor, the same 64mm planar grinder burrs, and the same grind path. In home use it is a real nuisance as the autogrind switch is less convenient to use for small volume, shot to shot, grinding than is the proper on-off switch one finds on the Junior. Because the Junior and the Cadet both grind rapidly, the autogrind and on-off rocker switch of the Cadet are a real liability, and results in a lot of coffee waste. In retrospect I wish I had refused the Cadet and told them to re-order the Junior I had originally requested, but nonetheless the Cadet served me well for about 8 years as my sole grinder.
After about 8 years, I ordered a Mazzer Mini which I kept for 3 months, for use as a 2nd grinder; I found the Mazzer doser to be annoying and ended up selling the almost new grinder to an alt.coffee friend. After selling the Mazzer, I bought the first of two Cimbali Junior grinders, and shortly thereafter the 2nd one, retiring the Cadet to the basement for use as a spare, which never happened. I did, however, replace the old burrs on the Cadet with new ones several months ago, although did not use the grinder afterwards other than to test it.
I had heard about the Cimbali Max grinder, which has a hybrid Conical/Planar burr set, but read some conflicting things on the internet and doubted whether the burrs were as described. Further discussions here and elsewhere convinced me that it was a real product with both sets of burrs, similar to the highly regarded DRM belt driven grinders that Schomer and others used to rave about. The outer planar burrs on the Max have an external diameter of 64mm (like the planar burrs on the Junior, although they are of a different design), whereas the DRM planar burrs measured 68mm. I contacted T.J. Tarateta of Ammirati Imports, a Cimbali importer located in NY, who participates in these forums, and he graciously offered to obtain a couple of Max grinders for me to purchase, even though the Max grinder is not a grinder that they normally import. I received these grinders in late March, about 10 days before a long trip to France that ended in Long Beach at the SCAA convention.
Since obtaining the Max grinders, I sold one of my Junior grinders to a friend but kept the other one, and also had the Cadet grinder, which had not been used after having its burrs changed for new ones 6 months ago. All of the above is to simply illustrate that I have a lot of experience with Cimbali 64mm planar grinders, including the Junior and the Cadet, and that this experience spans 12 years, plus now about 5 weeks experience using the new Max grinders I received in March.
The Max "suffers" from the same major flaw as the Cadet in home use, i.e. it is an autofill grinder that is designed to fill the doser with coffee after which the grinder will shut off. For home use this is obviously not suitable, so one is forced to use the rocker "on-off" power switch in lieu of a proper on-off switch in order to grind per shot. A related flaw is the "flapper" sensor in front of the grinder chute leading into the doser, which makes cleaning the chute a bit of a chore. Finally, like the Cadet, the bean hopper is larger than the bean hopper of the Junior, and unlike the Junior, the Max is a couple of inches too high to fit under most kitchen cabinets. I should temper these negative comments by saying that the Max grinds approximately 1/2 as fast as the Junior or the Cadet, and as a result it is possible to learn how to use the power switch effectively so as not to grind too much coffee and end up with a big coffee waste problem. I never learned how to do this with the Cadet, as it simply grinds too fast for control of the power switch to work, but with the Max I quickly was able to grind per shot with no more bean wastage than with the Junior.
In actual use, the first thing I noticed with my new Max grinders was that it seemed that grind adjustments were easier, and needed less often. By this I mean, that changing in between different coffees, or adapting to changes in coffee as it aged, or dealing with weather and humidity changes -- all of which normally require grinder setting adjustments on the Junior and Cadet grinders, seemed to require less adjusting or in some cases no adjusting in order to use the Max to get good espresso shots with proper time/volume relationships. In addition, the "quality" of the grinds are different; from the Junior, they are like grains of sand, but from the Max, even with robust doser thwacking, one gets small clumps. These are not "bad clumps," however, and the basket dose is easily distributed and packed, with no added channeling evident on a bottomless portafilter. I also noticed a small and subjective improvement in shot quality with the Max, but of course that sort of conclusion is pretty easy to talk yourself into, especially as a means of justifying a recent (and expensive) purchase.
Shortly after returning home from my Vancouver trip, I received a Priority Mail package containing 5lbs of coffee, Rocket Coffee Roaster's Classic Espresso Blend to be precise.
That is one nice blend and I do thank Larry for kindly sending it! This coffee made the following blind tasting a pleasure rather than a chore.
I decided I better get serious about this grinder comparison, and quick, before the coffee got too far along in its evolution; I did freeze about half of it for future testing (or drinking!) since I didn't think we could possibly use up 5lbs of it with the testing I had envisioned, at least at this point. So, I got the Cadet and Junior grinders out of the basement, and lined them up with one of the new Maxs for a "family portrait:"
I had previously decided to use the Cadet grinder in the head to head comparisons with the Max grinder, because the Cadet, like the Max, had new grinder burrs. My remaining Junior grinder has 3 year old burrs, which although not anywhere near ready for replacement, might introduce an additional undesired variable into the testing. Given the identical planar burr set, grind path, and doser, I felt comfortable using the Cadet for this comparison rather than the Junior.
I enrolled a friend, Bob, also a home espresso enthusiast who owns an Andreja Premium (and now, my former Junior grinder as well!), as a fellow taster. He had also served admirably during the frozen coffee study previously published on this website. Bob had one requirement, which was that he did not want to become "buzzed" like he did after the two days of 8-shot pairs he experienced on the freezing trial. What I designed was a brief paired shot blind tasting trial utilizing my two Cimbali Junior espresso machines, in much the same way they were used in the freezing trial.
In brief, we had the same Rocket Coffee Roasters coffee in both the Cadet and the Max grinders, and for half of the test period each grinder was paired with one of the espresso machines, and for the other half, with the other machine, in a balanced design. There were a total of 10 paired, blind tasted shots, of which I tasted 6 pairs and Bob tasted 4 pairs. For the first 5 paired shots the older vibratory Pourover Junior was paired with the Cadet grinder, and the newer Rotary Junior espresso machine was paired with the Max, then for the last five the grinder and espresso machines paired were the opposite. Simultaneous shots with equivalent time/volume parameters were pulled on the two machines and then presented simultaneously in a blinded fashion to the taster as "right" and "left" cups. These shots were made with bottomless portafilters filled to be flat with the top of the PF basket with about 17g of coffee, tamped lightly, and then pulled as 1.25-1.5 oz double shots over about 25-30 seconds. They were poured directly into white Revol porcelain espresso cups located directly beneath the bottomless PFs.
The taster's "job" was to compare the two shots according to 4 parameters and to determine (1) the intensity of the aroma and taste; (2) the quality of the crema; (3) the mouth feel; and, (4) the overall preference. The identities of what was in each cup in each pair were determined by the "server" of the coffees with coin flips prior to testing; these were not revealed to the tasters until the entire tasting session had been completed.
Prior to starting the testing, the espresso machines were adjusted with their PID electronic temperature controls and a Scace Thermofilter, to produce equivalent shot temperatures during shot series mimicking the frequency of shot pulls that was performed during this blind tasting. The brew temperature was approximately 199 to 200F for this study. Extraction pressures were measured to be approximately 9 bar, with each machine having its own sort of preinfusion, either from the innate behavior of vibe pumps, or the preinfusion modification I have performed on my rotary machine with a solid state delay timer, previously described on this website in several postings and prior experiments.
After a couple of hours we had test results, and after looking at them casually it was my impression that the results were random and not indicating any preference between the grinders. I then scanned the tasting sheets and sent them off to Jim Schulman, our resident statistics expert, who "tortured the data until it confessed," yielding real results that I had not expected; the Max actually scored higher than the Cadet, in all four comparison categories given above.
I'm going to quote from a couple of paragraphs from Jim's analysis without going into any of the numerical underpinings, which I am going to let Jim explain for himself in a subsequent post (largely because I'd prefer not to make too big of a fool of myself, not having actually done any statistical calculations myself in the last two decades):
"The Max did a better job in all the categories . . . . .In essence, the Max spanked the Cadet when it was paired with the rotary, and did slightly worse when paired with the vibe. Bob liked the Max a bit more than Ken did. . . . . The outcome is consistent across all the taste categories. This consistency adds to the significance of the result, since if the result were just chance, it would be like flipping 4 heads in a row."
"My conclusion is that the Max grinds an immediately perceivable better shot on the rotary Cimbali than the Cadet or Junior grinder. On the Vibe machine, the edge disappears completely. Whether this conclusion about the Max applies to all rotary and vibe machines is unknown. However, the results warn that one needs to check for an interaction between conical grind quality and the pump being used."
Personally speaking, I find these results interesting however from my perspective, after using the Max daily for more than a month, I think the most persuasive reason to buy one is the increased certainty of getting a good shot without excessive fiddling with grinder settings. Although I had made the observation about the setting being less critical on the Max before I set up this tasting trial, the proof of that observation came as I used the grinders in this testing. Before my friend Bob came over for the tasting, I dialed the grinders in with the Rocket Coffee Roasters Classic Espresso blend. It took SIX double shots, 5 of which were sink shots, to get the Cadet dialed in. With the Max, there was one sink shot, one mediocre shot, and beautiful shot for the 3rd. Midway through the actual tasting when we switched the grinder machine pairs, I had to toss one set of shots because the Cadet needed to be adjusted to go from the vibe machine to the rotary. Not only that, but I needed to make small adjustments on the Cadet a couple of other times during the 10 shot trial. I never adjusted the Max, not even once, from start to finish of the testing including the switchover from pairing it with the rotary to the vibe.
T.J. Tarateta has posted here recently that they will be bringing in a modified version of the Max for the N. American market, having the attributes of the Max with the form factor of the Junior. I believe that this modified Max will lack autogrind and have a smaller, Junior sized hopper. It will therefore be very "home kitchen friendly," fitting under counters and with the appearance of a Junior which will look good in most kitchens. You can't say that about the huge pure Conical grinders being tested in this grinder project, and this is a point very important to also consider.
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