Mike:

With the static screen retained in the Kony-E then no static. Remove the screen and that will be the last time you do that! What a mess...

The Pharos with the Voodoodaddy Mods is pretty good but the 4 day Post Roast SM #23 has more static than I have had with anything so far, and I have tried at least 12 different blends and SO from various Roasters. The SM I tried yesterday was roasted on a Behmor, and while I was getting a demo on the Behmor we roasted some #24 so in a few days I will see if the static is different.

A big variable in humidity is the time of year. Winter seems to be drier because the heat pump is on more and the indoor humidity is 39% were as the outdoor is 97%. If I could leave the windows open and no AC or Heat pump I am sure it would be better but we live on a very busy road, like thousands of cars a day so the road noise and dirt and exhaust fumes mean a closed environment. The joys of city life

Stephen

Could the x# of following reviews please indiciate:

•If a WDT is required (and what sort), and
•How they are dosing (pf stand, included cup thing, basket, etc.)
•Videos of grinding and distribution and a naked pf shot videos would be AWESOME!!!

Love,

BB

p.s. someone send terranova one so he can tell us all the tolerances (but seriously tho)

Got my final payment email this morning. I ordered a 71mm on Dec 7th.

Yep, December 16th here, too! Only I ordered the 71mm. I'm curious what numbers they are shipping out currently. I'm order #100, according to what I read in the email confirmation.

Mine has arrived, and I am at work.

Unfortunately, I will not get to play with it until tomorrow at the earliest.

The day job is getting in the way of coffee fun today. People need their knees replaced. Job security is not something to complain about.

I need to find 5-10kg of cheep crappy coffee to season the burrs anyway. That may take a few days. I should have thought of that before. Kony-E was horridly inconsistent until 10kg had gone through the burrs.

The old work Mini-E (not Kony) is going for sale, if anyone needs one.

Mike

Hi,

I'm new to the forum, but i thought i'd give my initial impressions on the hg-one. I have an Elektra Semi-automatica, and the HG is replacing my Elektra MSC grinder.

On Delivery:
I received it last Wednesday, it only took 1 day to ship from California to Toronto, Canada! Very impressive.

Initial Problem:
I followed the directions on the sheet provided to set up the grinder, but on my first try at grinding it got stuck. After writing an email for help to HG-one, i got a call from Craig within minutes and he helped me get it unstuck... i think it was the same incident that happened to TomC. I'd probably recommend keeping the grind settings looser than directed for the first couple of cranks. In any case, I'm super impressed by HG-one's customer service.

Seasoning:
I got several pounds (5?) of beans to season the grinder from my local roaster, Social Coffee. Steve, the owner, warned me of the dangers of using old beans (the ones I was saving over the past months specifically for seasoning) due to their rancid nature, and he was kind enough to provide some fresher beans. So I started off seasoning the burrs... must admit my arm got sore after grinding for over ½ hour.

On Static:
It's pretty dry in Toronto and I got tons of static and clinging grinds. After reading about RDT, I decided to use an atomizer to solve the problem. A couple of sprays of water on the beans and static is solved. If I give the bottom cone a couple of knocks after grinding, my retention is actually less than 0.1 grams

On the blind tumbler:
I actually find it useless. It causes an uneven distribution on my 58mm portafilter.

On skipping WDT:
I tried it once... just distribute the grinders instead of mixing it up... I got terrible channeling. I didn't try it again, WDT doesn't add much to the process, so I'll just continue with WDT.

How I do it:
I just follow the same steps as the HG video shows here: http://hg-one.com/portfolio-items/paul-grinds-2/ .I have the same funnel, so it's not a problem.

How do I like it?
I'm using Social beans right now, the Cafundó Brazil, and the Yirgacheffe. I don't know if I've ever had a god shot before but it's really amazing espresso. Better than any café I've tried, and at the level of the shots I've sampled at Social Coffee (steve has a slayer and versalabs m3). Something of note is the amount of oils that are preserved. Perhaps due to the lower grinding speeds, the grinds don't heat up and thus more oils are preserved?

On Cleaning:
Just as the HG cleaning video shows, it's dead easy.

Conclusion:
Very happy customer. I'm now on a journey to retry every type of bean I've ever tried on my machine.

P.S.

Adjustment:
I used the sticker provided, and i find it very easy to adjust. The Brazil and the Yirgacheffe require 2 different grind settings, and it was very easy to adjust for both and once dialed in, go back and forth b/w the 2.

Channeling:
With the method i use, no channeling. So far a great extraction each time.

My 83mm HG One was one of the first grinders shipped out, but I didn't want to post any observations until there were more of them out there in HB member hands. Here are a few quick notes.

The grinder is a pleasure to use. It is very solidly built, and the hand grinding aspect is not an issue. I had some static on the first couple shots, but almost nothing thereafter, even in a very dry house. It is extremely novel to have essentially zero retention without any special effort. There should be a mark on the base under the funnel, because lining up the basket is a chore.

My grind adjustment also slipped and locked the burrs on the first day. This seems to be a common issue. The carrier should be reverse threaded to prevent it.

Grinding straight into the basket produces the doughnut extraction to end all doughnut extractions; it is completely unusable. The blind tumbler does not improve distribution at all, and actually seems to make it worse with a 58mm basket. My suggestion would be to ditch it and supply a basic funnel of the required diameter and one of the mini whisks shown in the HG One videos (really wish I had one).

Unfortunately, I have not had much of a chance to play with the grinder since the first couple days (Jan 14-15). I do not have a handy dosing funnel or WDT tools, and my results were not very great. I am going to grab a few pounds of cheap supermarket beans to see if seasoning the burrs makes an improvement. I strongly advise spring lever users to proceed with caution when dialing in the grinder, because a poorly distributed or much too coarsely ground dose can become a pretty messy or potentially dangerous situation when you cannot quickly end the extraction.

I wrote about it before, but here's my solution. And it's a free solution. I brought home a small stack of 8 oz Solo cups from work . It's also completely clean, grinding directly into the cup. It's also perfect since the cup sits just above the lowest part of the funnel, there's not a single stray grind that can fall away from where I want it. One fine mist onto the beans, into the grinder and done. I shake/rattle the cup a bit and pinch it at the top so it pours cleanly and easily into my portafilter. It extracts dead on perfect, no WDT. Without it, I get horrible channeling and a sink shot.

It actually takes a lot of time out of the prep of the shot. I'm not going from step to step, whisking, lifting out the blind doser plug, stirring with a pin, etc. From the end of the grinding to in the portafilter is about 3 seconds.