Orphan Espresso LIDO cupping grinder - Page 13

Grinders are one of the keys to exceptional espresso. Discuss them here.
penrod
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#121: Post by penrod »

I guess looking at the pretty lines and ignoring all the numbers below them was a bad idea, you provided more data than I know what to do with.

The LIDO I ordered will probably not get the attention I would like to give it, as my wife is due 3/19, and little ones change far to fast. But I have to say the grinder looks amazing and I can't wait to get my hands on one.

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orphanespresso (original poster)
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#122: Post by orphanespresso (original poster) »

Nah, with a baby due mid March you will be grinding for a LOT of coffee :D .

Yes all the lines and numbers. Barb wanted to nix the whole thing but I really wanted to get this out there in some way. It has more to do with small conical burrs than anything, and she could attest to my constant "IF you think about it....." and I'm not saying that folks don't think about it, but IF you think about it these conical burrs have been around for a couple of centuries or more, certainly pre espresso and they are still used as a go to burr for espresso, large format or small in various grinders. The 1800's era grinders were meant for coarse grinding and used a conical burr, but often it had very short small cutters, which makes sense, but there is not much difference in conical burrs from about 1900 onward, and since there was not "cream coffee" until the late '40's they were not much thinking about espresso grinding but hidden there in the burr design is the bimodal espresso grind just aching to come out.
So in an odd way it was a design that was waiting for a purpose and the purpose just coincidentally arrived a few centuries after the original design. But with the Egyptian craze of the 1920's and the "discovery" of Turkish coffee brought a big Mocca craze in the European grinders, and they tweaked the burrset a little to enable some real fine grinding for this "new" coffee (which was as I said centuries old) and rebadged the grinders with Mocca or Mokka but they were the same burrs in a different package and since there was this emphasis on fine grinding the whole thing skewed from coarse grinding as the standard to fine as the true test of a good grinder to the point that today the worth of a grinder is tested on its ability to grind for espresso which, IF you think about it is a no brainer since the espresso grind capability is built into the burr and can't be easily removed. It is a win/win situation for a grinder maker since it is easy to do an espresso grind and the consumer wants it so voila.
But then the good coarse grinders got left behind since coarse grinding is passe from a consumer standpoint (especially since the consumer wants this perfect grind in about 15 seconds max) and you have to go WAY out of your way to make this happen using the conical burr, unless you use a burr that has a gap toothed cutter system which allows the large pieces to fall out of the grind path and not be groomed by the secondary cutters (which existed in some of the Freidrich's mills ca.1900) and since that is not really feasible from a small timer's standpoint one is left to try to use the small conical in a VERY slow turning format to reduce as many of the secondary grooming attributes of the small cutters of the burr and try very hard to get around the natural tendency of these burrs to produce a bimodal grind for espresso.

So IF you think about it there is a lot to think about but the graphs are possibly easier to digest than all of the other stuff to think about on this topic, but my general observations are that with any grinder you 1) can't avoid some microfines (sludge), 2) with a stable enough burr alignment and slow turning you can get a nice big fat coarse grind with a minimum of sub target particles 3) with the same parameters as 2 you can continue to grind coarser and coarser without a lot of big chunks as one often sees 4) the fine to medium drip range is a hard target to hit with a great deal of consistency and 5)a lot of grinder evaluations are highly subjective. This is not a rant by any means just the stuff I have been thinking about relative to coffee grinding.

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drgary
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#123: Post by drgary »

orphanespresso wrote:This is not a rant by any means just the stuff I have been thinking about relative to coffee grinding.
Doug:

How much coffee have you been drinking?

You are truly obsessed and this is why this latest set of grinders is going to be very good. :D
Gary
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What I WOULD do for a good cup of coffee!

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orphanespresso (original poster)
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#124: Post by orphanespresso (original poster) »

How much coffee? Just the usual 8 espressos a day give or take :shock:

Actually, when I think about it, through sheer happenstance of fiddling with hand grinders for a few years a lot of arcane information has accumulated in my mind. Over the past year all of this arcana has been coalescing at an increasing rate toward something that is beginning to feel like understanding. So I suppose the obsessional aspect of this, or anything, is that when some bit of insight or factoid comes floating along I can't help but grab it and try to fit it in to this developing picture.

Any of us admitted coffee obsessives, I think, develop this same kind of mindset, of trying to file a lot of disparate concepts and observations into some cohesive understanding of the big picture, so as a group of very different people but with a shared interest, I think we can mostly understand each other....or at least understand what can seem to some like obsessional behavior.

But in some ways the new grinder is simply an attempt to bring some balance into the coffee grinder market as it has become so espresso centric and those people wanting a reasonably good grinder for coarse have had few alternatives but some extreme batch grinders, a few claimants to quality grind, and the current (new) hand grinders, when it comes to coarse grinding, suck. JMHO.

And also, like many people I enjoy the occasional brewed cup of coffee and and not only hate to, but REFUSE to change my espresso setting....that grinder is dialed in for life!

ajsteel
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#125: Post by ajsteel »

Hi Doug,
Thanks for your efforts so far! It would be great to see comparisons between other grinders, ie baratza preciso, and the LIDO in terms of your analysis using screens. I know this is a very intensive process, but demonstrating s significant decrease in fines would likely move a lot of people toward buying the LIDO. Ideally, we could all taste test the difference, but in absence of that the quantitative information is useful.
It's a pretty cool niche you and Barb have carved out, so congrats on pursuing your passion successfully.
Cheers!

scareyourpasenger
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#126: Post by scareyourpasenger »

I have noticed with my precisio that if I run it without pulsing a bit to keep the rpms down it will create more fines. I love the idea of being able to control the speed of the grind which may cut down on the fines. Could be just because the pop corning but it can be very hard to avoid when single dosing.

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orphanespresso (original poster)
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#127: Post by orphanespresso (original poster) »

Mmmm, I can smell the coffee! 20 grams of beans, ground for French Press, took Doug 60 seconds to grind!
Barb

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dcupstateNY
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#128: Post by dcupstateNY replying to orphanespresso »

Barb ... you're such a tease :lol:
Ciao,
Dave

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jbviau
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#129: Post by jbviau »

Barb and Doug, do you do the majority of your personal grinding by hand? Don't think I'd want to arm-wrestle either of you!
"It's not anecdotal evidence, it's artisanal data." -Matt Yglesias

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dcupstateNY
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#130: Post by dcupstateNY »

T - 16 ... tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock ............... :wink:
Ciao,
Dave

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