I too single dose. My girlfriend can only have decaf and I have decaf at night, so I can't keep the hopper full or half-full.

The tamper solution wouldn't work for me since the grinder's throat is too small. However, after I made this mod last week I don't think that a weight is necessary. (For me, this mod totally makes single-dosing viable with this grinder.) A single dose of beans are in a very small column on top of one another and feed directly into the burrs; there's nowhere else for them to go but up, and the black divider thingy keeps that from happening. (Only closed part-way in the pic so you can see how much space 15.0 grams of Luna Nuova takes up.)


After reading this thread this morning I found something that is almost perfect as a weight, just to try it out.


It doesn't weigh very much and will sink down with the beans as they're ground to finally rest on the spinning nut at the bottom. However, I think it wasn't as good as not having it since a few very small pieces crept up the side, and I heard a little extra grinding than when I didn't use it. I then had to shake the pieces off and pulse the grinder to put them through.

An alternative to this is the small end of the plastic tamper that came with the Duetto. It's too big to follow the beans down because it rests on the top of the cardboard throat extension so it's not acting as a weight but it does reduce the distance out of the throat that a bean can pop by about an inch or so.


I'll play a bit with these a bit more but so far I don't think there's any difference that my limited experience/palate can detect in the cup.

Unfortunately my Vario has a safety mechanism so I cannot run it without the hopper on, I single dose. Does anyone know if the Vario grind is affected much by weight of the beans?

I believe due to the reduced flow at the end of the grind I get some clumps, which I don't believe I'd get if I had the hopper full. Haven't tested it yet, because I don't like the idea of not knowing precisely how much coffee I'm using. I guess that's where the Vario-W (with a built in scale) would have came in handy.

I find that there are many advantages to weighing beans for a single dose, and with the Vario in particular only slight (if any) problems w/ popcorning. I've tried it both ways. IMO, losing track of dosage is a bigger problem than the ever-so-slight variation in grind.

My experience is that that Vario is most consistent with at least an inch or so of beans in the hopper. It's certainly usable for single dosing, but some variation may occur. I suspect this would happen more with hard light-roasted beans.

I've done some work on a closely related topic regarding hopper replacements and how beans behave, but I didn't want to hijack this already useful thread and so I posted them on their own.

This thread being revived spurred me to post some thoughts this morning in Replacing Titan Hoppers - Replicating Bean Weight and Behavior. Then (for what it may be worth) there's another thread about a Titan grinder/hopper modification.