maximatica wrote:I ground some frozen Hairbender a few weeks back (forgot to take them out the night before) and it was off as you would expect with the frozen coffee pulling the brew temp down. An hour or so later and they were back to normal.

"As you would expect"?

I've never tried it, but no, I wouldn't expect a measurable impact on the brew temperature for coffee ground from room temperature beans vs. frozen. Does burr heating coffee grounds negatively affect taste of espresso? shows why I am skeptical:



As the graph shows, the grinder chamber warms up quickly due to friction and that much metal isn't going to be cooled much by 14 grams of cold cellulose. That said, perhaps frozen coffee grinds differently and that would explain your observation (i.e., more fines due to greater "shattering")?

HB wrote: i.e., more fines due to greater "shattering"?

That would be my expectation. The major reason different coffees require different grind settings for espresso is the fines they create, i.e. how brittle the cellulose is. This is easy to demonstrate -- who changes grind settings for any other brewing method?

Lighter than the middle of the first crack roasts are usually impossible for espresso, since the remaining moisture in the beans makes then too soft for fines. Old, dark roasted, and low grown coffees all require finer grinds, since the beans are softer. It could be that grinding frozen beans, and the presumably coarser grind this allows, would make these coffees more manageable. Imagine ... monsooned malabar not tasting like overextracted sawdust