malachi wrote:Not guaranteed to give best results. Past a certain point, with many coffees you'll have better luck going coarser and increasing dose instead.

So you'd revise and extend my remarks, as follows: to maintain the flow as the roast ages, grind a little finer each day (assuming dose remains constant); however, there may come a day when the incrementally finer grind no longer has the same effect on the flow that it had been having, and on that day, you can go coarser and increase the dose.

No.
Flow changes also.
To get the best taste results, with many coffees you may find that at a certain age, going with a higher dose and coarser grind gives better results (despite changing flow ie volume/time).

cafeIKE wrote:Going farther, I'm still not convinced that clumps per se deserve their bug-a-boo reputation.

I share your skepticism, though perhaps not to the same degree.

The Macap MXK clumped more than any grinder in the Titan Grinder Project, and yet it was easy to dial in and extractions were even without primping. My hunch is that there are benign clumps and not-so-benign clumps. These barista-friendly clumps may correlate with large conical grinders, which would explain why they gained favor among pros years ago and home baristas more recently. That is, the taste profile of large conical grinders may be almost indistinguishable from flat burrs in the absolute sense, but the conicals have a greater "forgiveness factor" and thus appear superior to flat burr grinders in practice.

malachi wrote:So the real issue here is that you had an entirely different coffee and were assuming that you could pull it using the same parameters as you had with the previous coffee.

I never gave a thought to it one way or the other until the extraction was problematic. The challenge was to find a solution (and hopefully identify the cause) when the extraction changed.

I had been using various Brazil coffees as a base for years.. around the last five years or maybe a bit more. In the many years I have been using a bottomless portafilter I have NEVER had extractions like that. But as I get more coffees from this new source it will be interesting to see if the Brazil was the cause or it was something else.

"If espresso was easy, *$$ could do it."
-R.G.

Brazil != Brazil

malachi wrote:You need to be consistent on dose also.
A plastic yogurt cup won't help with that.
You need to have consistent weight or volume shot to shot. If weight, the max variance is 0.3g (with a target variance of 0.1g).

This is really important (in fact, far more important than other things - like tamp for example).

My suspicion is that your inconsistency in dose is very high and that and a high degree of inconsistency in distribution/bedding is causing MUCH of your struggle

I need to find a yogurt cup that it slightly conical in shape. This morning I tried with a cut out cup. I stirred with a wooden skewer (kind that you put on the Barbie) I was surprised to see how many clumps there were and thought if I was to buy the Grinder all over, I would pick a doser to avoid clumping.

I thought I was so clever buying the M4D avoiding cleaning the doser unit with old grains and clicking coffee grinds that inevitably fall all over the place. Grind and have the grains fall directly in to the portafilter what could be easier. Hmmm, now I have to stir.

Well the result was interesting and will now take another adapt as the stirring makes the grains finer and less volumetric in the basket and a bit more "fluffy" I found myself having difficulty keeping the 3 turns at the end to lock in the tamp a difficult thing to keep "level". That the grains can get soft and too mushy, not solid like before, packed if you know what I mean.

The coffee came out much stronger, darker and the taste was slightly more bitter which leads me to think I over tamped trying to adapt to the finer grains due to the stirring.

also note* that because the cutout cup was straight (vertical) when I lifted it out of the basket, it left a ring around, a space so to speak which I had to push the grains into, to fill up and wonder how this played in the whole obsessive path.

malachi wrote:No.
Flow changes also.
To get the best taste results, with many coffees you may find that at a certain age, going with a higher dose and coarser grind gives better results (despite changing flow ie volume/time).

At roughly what age have you found this transition to occur, typically? In the first week? After week 1? After week 2? Is depth-of-roast implicated?

misterdoggy wrote:This morning I tried with a cut out cup. I stirred with a wooden skewer (kind that you put on the Barbie)

Use a fine needle. A BBQ skewer is to thick and causes as many problems as it cures.

Notice how fine the needle is on the stirrer atop the scale. The corkscrew device is used to clear the MC4 chute after each dose.



Quit obsessing. On good days my MC4 is less clumpy than the dosered La Cimbali Max Hybrid. Darker roasts, which I rarely use, are more clumpy. A quick go round with a needle und alles gute.

How much stirring are we talkin bout ? I mean the clumps break up and if you mix it around everything becomes finer and finer ?

When I WDT, I go once around the basket in a continuous series of circles of radius slightly more than half the basket diameter.

sort of gives the idea.

But ya gotta use a FINE implement