another_jim wrote:This discussion reminds me of cooking shows and the $125,000 ham sandwich.

My favorite cooking show was Jacques Pepin spending a half hour with a cutting board, a knife, a range, and a few pots and pans to make a three course meal. My least favorite is Martha Stewart spending a week with 50 assistants and using $125,000 worth of gear to make a ham sandwich. Stewart will assert that this is the only real ham sandwich, and that nothing else is a scientifically correct ham sandwich.

biting into my own homemade ham sandwich, thinking about what I just saw on TV and decided to even care less.
Same with Ben K. all the measurement, refractometer stuff, cool what can be done, but what's in for me?
I guess when you start to follow that road, is that you open the pandora's box. Then it's not the grinder anymore,
than its the roaster, the transport, the growing and the pain the EK itself adds as it's used out of specs (it was designed as a shop grinder)

So meanwhile I continue to enjoy my levered under extracted ristretto .....

The brewing of coffee may be treated as an art or a science. Depending on which path is selected will determine a final result in the cup. Odds are high that either method will produce uniquely different results. This is the difference between the approach of Jacques Pepin and Martha Stewart, one is an artist and the other a scientist.

OldNuc wrote:This is the difference between the approach of Jacques Pepin and Martha Stewart, one is an artist and the other a scientist.

Can't buy that. Marthat Stewart is not a scientist. She's an ex-caterer/business woman who teaches the domestic arts of gracious living, and markets associated stuff. For that matter, very few of the people who claim to bring "science" to coffee are scientists, or actually bring science to coffee. And as Jim has pointed out on several occasions, quite a few of them also market associated stuff.

Although science may help you understand some of the processes, following a recipe is not science and neither is creating one. They're cooking. It doesn't matter how many measurements you take along the way, cooking is not science.

Rich

The cooking that went on in "Breaking Bad" got a lot of high school kids interested in chemistry...

In all seriousness I guess the best answer to my original question would be "we know by empirical evidence that large conicals require less adjustment to get a desired flow rate and while a lot of exploring, scientific or otherwise, is being done to find out why, there are not yet any definitive answers. " I suppose I can live with that for now as long as my coffee still tastes great. Unfortunately my mental curiosity is not nearly as satisfied as my taste buds.

boar_d_laze wrote:.

Although science may help you understand some of the processes, following a recipe is not science and neither is creating one. They're cooking. It doesn't matter how many measurements you take along the way, cooking is not science.

Rich

You and others are repeatedly using the word "science", not the folk in the linked articles & clips. Straw men abound.

As we all know in cooking, no one ever measures anything, times anything, or has any idea of temperature...cooks never sell anything, or market/review/recommend products....

Science & cooking are not mutually exclusive, in coffee & cooking the result and whether it has aesthetic properties defines the result, however you get there. All this pseudo philosophy has nothing to do with making coffee, it just shines a light on different individual's perceptions of what they do & why...also on their seemingly unshakable belief that they are right.

There seems to be a perception that we are being told how to enjoy, if this were the case (it doesn't strike me as such), why would we relish being told what not to enjoy any better? Two sides of the same coin...the currency is hipocrisy.

dominico wrote:In all seriousness I guess the best answer to my original question would be "we know by empirical evidence that large conicals require less adjustment to get a desired flow rate and while a lot of exploring, scientific or otherwise, is being done to find out why, there are not yet any definitive answers."

Indeed, that point was made on pages 1 and 2.

I think this thread contains some good food for thought, but my years of moderating enables me to recognize the clear signs of lastworditus taking hold. To slow the disease's progress, I am locking this thread, if only to encourage the contributors to consider how to word a more succinct, innovative, and nuanced repetition of their previous points.

PS: As a point of reference, contributors to this thread may want to check out Grinders - Why is bigger better in a home setting? and Why is espresso with higher extraction yield "better"? and Compak K-10 PB: New to the World of Big Conics since they cover some of the same points discussed in this thread.