When something is not tasting well in your coffee the first thing you've got to try are the beans (la Micela), as they are the ones responsible for the taste. It's the same with wine, or cheese or an apple.
The others Ms will only contribute to show, more or less, this taste.
There are two places in town were I used to buy my coffee, both had great beans provided by two excellent coffee farms, repeatedly awarded with the Excellence Cup. However, when they had to replenish their stocks, what they got from the new harvest (2010) wasn't nearly as good as the old one, and I had to buy elsewhere.
Coffee is a natural product and roasting is never exactly the same every time, differences of taste MUST happen, from one batch to the other and from one day to the other.

For me, when a bean is described as "hard to dial in" that means it has a narrow window for optimal brew parameters to produce a good tasting shot. Right now, I'm pulling Esmerelda Geisha from Trysterro (sp?) which for me, is very easy to dial in because the three main sections are all great tasting. Iow, the bitters, acidic and middle favors are all equally good so if the shot is pulled too tight, it still tastes good. Same for too fast a pull. Hopefully, this makes sense. When a bean is hard to dial in, for me, that usually means there is either a major flaw that needs to be worked around or one of the three sectors is either so overpowering or so easily lost that care needs to be taken to deal with that shortcoming. The good news is that once you get the basics dialed in, pulling "hard to dial in" coffees aren't hard at all.

shawndo wrote:For those of you that said Hairbender likes to be more on the ristretto side. What would happen if you didn't. Does that mean it blonded early for you?

I'm the first to admit that I'm not the most expert here, but I have used around 10-15 lbs of Hairbender in the last couple of years on two machines. I also frequently sample it at the Ace Hotel Stumptown, as do you. Compared to most other beans, and also to previous Hairbender, the current version seems to start very slowly but gain more than the usual flow rate increase as the shot progresses. This seems the case with both VST and original LM baskets. I needed to grind unusually fine and go more ristretto than before to get the best taste. While I pulled previous versions at 70%, I'm now around 85%. It seems like the age window on this stuff is unusually narrow too, only a few days.

My main suggestion is simply to try bigger changes rather than sticking closer to familiar settings. I would encourage others giving advice to actually try it for themselves. Of course, the basic adjustment/dial in procedure is the same as ever, but this blend is nonetheless somewhat atypical IMO.

cpreston wrote:the current version seems to start very slowly but gain more than the usual flow rate increase as the shot progresses

Don't want to start a flame war here, but I've heard this more than once about the M3 in general. Is it only stumptown that behaves like this for you? I can't remember if it does that for other beans for me. It's been a while.

Until you determine what's causing the early blonding, I would stay away from the M3 and experiment only with the Robur. The Robur is a proven and very forgiving performer. At best, there's disagreement about the M3.

For heaven sake, try a different coffee! It's already been suggested that you try a forgiving blend like Redbird. There are lots of other candidates out there, as mitch suggests. Use a coffee like that to verify that your equipment and technique are up to snuff, and if they are, tackle the tricky dial-in that seems to be required by the latest Hairbender.

Peppersass wrote:The original brew boiler gauge on my GS/3 failed and I had to replace it. The whole story is here.

Thanks to Peppersass, I replaced the brew gauge without much hassle. It looks like it was clogged with some copper verdigris.

After you installed the new gauge, was the pressure reading significantly different than it was with the clogged gauge?

My brew gauge was not having the same problem as you. It was just plain broke. It was stuck at 3 bar and didn't move no matter what was going on. This ended up being unrelated to any of my problems, which I discovered after I was able to borrow and verify my brew pressure was a little high, but not too bad.

I hope to get back to troubleshooting this weekend.