TMI, TMI. Some things cannot be un-imagined.

SlowRain wrote:Hi, Bak Ta Lo. Welcome to H-B. Nice to see another user from Asia on here. Enjoy your grinders.

Thanks SlowRain! I hope to get to travel to Taiwan some this year, my 1 month old daughter is not up for travel yet, but as soon as she is portable we are going to get out and about. Have you ever been to "Fong Da" coffee in Taipei? They have one other fresh roast shop outside of Taiwan and it is here in Macau, they roast some great beans and are crazy good siphonist.

Sunday update....a lot of hand grinding and weighing and for what is is worth....actually a bit enlightening if you are into it...here are some numbers and graphs with the circles and arrows on the back omitted.



There is actually a lot of information here, maybe more than anyone really cares to process. The charts are divided into two, the first one is fine to coarse/fine, which suffers from a lack of data points, and the second is the coarse range which does reveal a best set point on the grinder....I have been grinding WAY too coarse. But then, only too coarse because I was not stretching out the extraction time to match. Espresso range was impossible to chart due to the limitations of our sieve system (.25 to .75= espresso range left out of the data due to some real problems in the sieve system...mostly clogging the whole thing up so the numbers were not reliable).

Just the facts folks. Vertical axis=% of particle size in sieve (gram weight of fraction/total sample weight), horizontal axis=sieve size.

Most interesting to me is that the relationship of burr setting to grind size is not linear. About 1/2 rotation of the adjuster for espresso, about 1 rotation more for drip to coarse drip, and about 2 more in the workable coarse range. The things one finds out

I've seen this question posted in this thread, but did not see an answer. What is the difference in grind time between the Pharos and the Lido. I'm trying to decide between these two mostly for my daily morning grind. Not being a morning person this is important.

The daily grind would be for a single morning coffee for a press. The weekend would be reserved for capuchino or espresso once I find an affordable machine to learn on.

All I'm looking for is a ballpark. IE the LIDO is 1.5 times, 2 times ... as long as the Pharos. 1.5 times would be fine. 4 times would take precious sleep time away.

Even if there are differences in grind quality, I think either would work very well for me.

We set up the Ditting to basically match the LIDO grind at 2 by look and feel of the grind. In the coarse ranges Ditting and LIDO produce about 10 percent micro fines as the unavoidable result of physical grinding. Given that any conical burr trends to espresso grinding (bimodal), our observations show the espresso grind being more or less set up as the burr is set tighter.
The study is interesting and I think valid for some general observations, though the data really suffers due to our range of sieves . The thing that is a bit mystifying is the coarse grind centering at 1mm. Is this a function of the burr size? Our sieve sizes would skew the numbers to a 1mm peak, I think. This 1mm peak must have to do with methodology. I can't come up with another explanation.
Most would argue that the ultimate test is in the cup anyway, so I am trying not to make too much of it. Next press pot will be a setting of 1.5 out from zero, since if the numbers are relevant, that one looks pretty good.

At least we got a paragraph explaining what each one was...

The graphs look to be excel products with the 'smooth line' feature turned on? If that is true, could you repost the graphs without the line smoothing? Maybe it is a pet peeve of mine, but I find excel line smoothing to obscure the data too much.

EDIT: I am very excited for mid-March to come around.

LOL - Ryan, that's why we posted the data too! You are more than welcome to crunch it, or smooth it, or dit-dot it any way you like (I personally hate making charts 'cause I don't do it often enough to ever be comfortable with it!) I much prefer 'tastes good', or 'tastes bad'... Frankly, part of the reason we did this is that we always hear raves about batch grinders being really consistent, but when we see the grinds, and poke through them, we see all sorts of different sized particles. Which leaves one wondering about the meaning of 'consistent'.
Barb