They say you should learn something new every day. Today's lesson was that if you take a hand grinder and try to break the world land speed record with the crank, the beans just bounce around in the hopper and don't actually feed into the burrs, thereby taking three or four times as long to grind the 14 grams of beans that are patiently waiting for you to slow down, so gravity can do its thing. I hadn't seen this particular quirk mentioned anyplace, but it just adds to the Zen element of completely hand-made espresso.

Going faster doesn't mean you get there any sooner.

I hope that my continuing posts about newbie experiences don't drive everybody crazy. If they do, I'll stop. Well, I won't stop, but I'll write about them someplace else.

Grinding fast also increases static. If you get a lot of static it helps to grind a couple of minutes before you want to brew, and let the grinds sit in the drawer. The static will dissipate. Alternately, you can lightly stir the grinds with the back of a metal coffee scoop to dissipate static.

I've never found the minute or so it takes to grind 14g of coffee overly taxing, but there are times when I go faster than others. Never felt the burrs get hot though

PC

If it had only taken a minute or so, I'd be okay. It took me closer to 8 minutes, and since I'm still learning the vagaries of the grinder and the Caravel, it was way too fine and choked the machine but good. At that point I was about 5 minutes from having to leave for work, so no espresso for GVDub today. I grabbed some of my Mokha/Sumatra blend on the way out the door and settled for Aeropress made at the office.

I need to set aside several hours this weekend and work on getting feel for how grind fineness affects the Caravel, as well as experiment with dosing and tamping (so far, I have an ibuprofen bottle that's pretty much the right size tamp until I get the custom spalted maple tamper I ordered from Les). I roasted some extra this week to give myself a bean buffer for the learning process.

GVDub wrote:If it had only taken a minute or so, I'd be okay. It took me closer to 8 minutes,

Get a small, cheap battery operated drill. You can set it on the 'torque' setting, and it'll run the grinder all day at a lower, steadier speed. And, with the proper attachment you can use it as a stringwinder and a high-speed drum key for those annoying Russian Dragons who never figured out that drums need to be tuned, too!

peacecup wrote:I've never found the minute or so it takes to grind 14g of coffee overly taxing

When you're the coffee person for a six or eight person encampment...

GVDub wrote:If it had only taken a minute or so, I'd be okay. It took me closer to 8 minutes,

Good gosh!
60 turns does it on my KyM.
Doug and Barb maybe played a joke on you and wound up your grinder REAL tight.
Seriously, 14-15 grams shouldn't take more than a minute TOPS with a grinder meant for espresso.
Mine grind gets coarser by rotating the adjuster clockwise. (as I face the grinder drawer.)

IMAWriter wrote:Good gosh!
60 turns does it on my KyM

Back when I was on the road playing 6 sets a night, I used to use talc on my hands. What I ended up with after that 8 minutes of grinding was approximately 14 grams of brown talc. I loosened it a bit and got much better results this morning. But it was still a couple hundred turns.

Completely OT: Playing a biker bar one night - one of those joints where there's no stage and the band is set up in the middle of the floor, usually in front of the bathrooms - I had spilled a little of the talc on the top of my amp. In the middle of a set, I saw two guys kinda stagger past it, do a double take, look around, lean down and snort it up real quick before I could point out the bottle of talc sitting about 6 inches away. I bet their sinuses were baby soft the next morning.

GVDub,

The tamper is coming along just fine and should be on its way soon. I need a 45mm for my new machine! Back on topic. I just got a new handgrinder from OrphanEspresso. My first shot this AM was a choke. I got lucky and dialed in the 2nd round and made an acceptable shot to make a Cappo for my wife. The third try was a charm and I really enjoyed two double shots before heading to work. For less than 5 shots, I like using a hand grinder. One trick I learned from another handgrinder is you can put your basket in the drawer and grind most of the grinds right into the basket. Just center the basket and grind away. I sure was nice to have a quiet morning coffee experience with the new grinder and my Elektra Micro Casa Leva. I have a Zass at work, and a nice Trosser that does a good job for Vac Pot.

Les

Thanks for the update, Les. I know enough custom luthiers to know never to rush a craftsman, so I'm content to muddle along with what I've got until you're done. Besides, it gives me more time to start to understand the vagaries of haphazard preparation using found objects - sort of the MacGyver espresso challenge. It's positively amazing just how many cylindrical objects around the house are just about 44.2mm

The grinder I got from Orphan has too narrow a drawer to hold a basket, but I'm using one of the scraper/scoop things that they sell for dosing and it works pretty well. The scraper edge is also better at leveling the basket than I can do with my finger.

GVDub wrote:Thanks for the update, Les. I know enough custom luthiers to know never to rush a craftsman, so I'm content to muddle along with what I've got until you're done. Besides, it gives me more time to start to understand the vagaries of haphazard preparation using found objects - sort of the MacGyver espresso challenge. It's positively amazing just how many cylindrical objects around the house are just about 44.2mm

The grinder I got from Orphan has too narrow a drawer to hold a basket, but I'm using one of the scraper/scoop things that they sell for dosing and it works pretty well. The scraper edge is also better at leveling the basket than I can do with my finger.

I love that scraper doser thingy, as I called it in a thread I posted a while back.
It is a must for neatness, for sure.

IMAWriter wrote:Good gosh!
60 turns does it on my KyM.
Seriously, 14-15 grams shouldn't take more than a minute TOPS with a grinder meant for espresso.

Although they have listed a couple of espresso grinders that require as much as 200 to 500 turns which I'm guessing might take a bit more than a minute.