Light roasts do NOT require very fine grinds like turkish on high extraction flat burrs (like SSP MP). And I guess you missed how all the cool kids are extracting espresso now using turbos, which lead to pretty high extraction.

happycat wrote:Have you read the titan grinder study? A pointer to a resource, in response to a rudely phrased demand for data, is not snark. Reading the study is a valuable experience to see the kind of work Jim used to support his statement.

A constructive response is to read the study, identify gaps based on methods or time passing, and propose ways to advance knowledge further for everyone. An HB-worthy approach would be to organize and conduct that followup and engage discussion based on results.

Yes I read it 15 years ago when it came out. Time's have changed.

That may be true for a fraction of the readers here. I'd guess that a majority of the readers are looking for classic, comfort espresso.

I'll also suggest that the burrs and alignment in most of the big-name grinders haven't changed much since then. A Super Jolly still has Super Jolly burrs. Marketing aside, I don't expect that any of the old-school names in grinders are producing anything significantly different in their flat-burr grinders*. If anyone's got blind-tasting evidence that burr coatings make a meaningful difference in the cup for level of use a grinder gets in the home, I'd be interested to read it.

I think that those chasing light roasts may be a vocal minority, but still a minority of espresso hobbyists that read H-B and other online sources.

* I'll admit that Mahlkonig apparently is doing better with factory alignment. However, the continuing threads around the other manufacturers don't suggest to me that their mainstream grinders are any better.

another_jim wrote:Perhaps I should make myself plain. I do not like having my mind (mis)read.



No, I haven't tested this new generation of single dosing 64mm grinders. Nor am I aware of anyone else doing much testing on them -- they are too new. But, based on several hundred hours of using 64mm flat burr grinders, I suspect that an attempt to grind Turkish or near Turkish fine, which is required for shots of very light roasts, will not work using conventional espresso burrs, since the beans will not feed. Very fine grinding on the Super Jolly or Eureka require a filled hopper, otherwise the bean don't feed. Why should the Lagom be different? The SSP Red Speed 64mm burrs, mounted in the Jolly, have similar travails when single dosing at very fine grinds.

The 75mm Mythos style burrs mounted on the Monolith work for fine grinding, although the feed rate is substantially slower than with conicals.

So let me out this so simple that even the fanboys can understand:

• Third wave espresso requires very fine grinds, just this side of Turkish
• The finer the grind, the harder it is to feed beans into the burrs
• Conicals and large flats have very large crushing zones, so the feed is maintained when single dosing
• Small flats, unless aided by an augur (like the DRM conical section) or with specially designed crushing zones, like the Vario/Forte ceramic burr, will need to have a large pile of beans on top of them to maintain feeding at fine grinds
• This makes single dosing 64mm flat grinders an iffy proposition for third wave roasts.

Now let me do a little mind reading of my own. How fine are you actually grinding on the Lagom?

Hmm, I don't know what you mean by beans not feeding. I single dose light roasts all the time on my lowly Eureka Mignon Specialita (55mm flat) and have no issue with bean feeding. Yes, I tend to grind quite fine (14g dose). So fine that I often find 1:2 ratio good enough for light roasts and not have to pull longer (e.g. 1:3) to get the sweetness.

Did you test it on the Specialita (55mm)? They have multiple Mignons, some with 50mm burrs. I ask because I just tried what you suggested and could not cause the feeding issue. Burrs touch on mine at -1.5. I went all the way down to -1.3 and it grinds fine in single dose (although clumping is more noticeable but probably expected). Surely 0.2 off from the real zero is Turkish because, for context, I usually grind at 0.4 to 1.0 (1.9-2.5 from real zero) for medium to med-dark roasts. For light roasts, around -0.2 to 0.3 (1.3 to 1.8 from real zero), roughly speaking.

In any case, I get rich and satisfying results with light roasts currently--if I grind finer it chokes or overextract easily. Note I also had to dial back on the ratio to avoid overextraction, so I don't feel like I am leaving much behind at the current grind setting. Maybe my "light" roast SOs from Counter Culture, Blue Bottle, etc. aren't light enough? lol. I recently had a coffee from a Nordic roaster (La Cabra) and again, no problem grinding fine enough...but to be fair I'm not sure it was a representative sample of "uber light" Nordic roasts.

Jeff wrote:That may be true for a fraction of the readers here. I'd guess that a majority of the readers are looking for classic, comfort espresso.

I'll also suggest that the burrs and alignment in most of the big-name grinders haven't changed much since then. A Super Jolly still has Super Jolly burrs. Marketing aside, I don't expect that any of the old-school names in grinders are producing anything significantly different in their flat-burr grinders*. If anyone's got blind-tasting evidence that burr coatings make a meaningful difference in the cup for level of use a grinder gets in the home, I'd be interested to read it.

I think that those chasing light roasts may be a vocal minority, but still a minority of espresso hobbyists that read H-B and other online sources.

* I'll admit that Mahlkonig apparently is doing better with factory alignment. However, the continuing threads around the other manufacturers don't suggest to me that their mainstream grinders are any better.

Both Mazzer and Mahlkonig are hardly the modern flat grinders I'm talking about. I'm talking about Lagom P64 and P100, the Weber EG-1, Bentwood Vertical 63, Monoliths, Levercraft Ultra, or even the lowly DF64 with SSP burrs. These are all grinders which extract much more from a coffee than the old school grinder like the super jolly (although you can actually fit SSP burrs in there and get the same performance but much worse workflow).

I look forward to a renewed Titan grinder project in which these new grinders and burrs are considered and tested, although I'm afraid that if you remain in the old school kind of espresso world (darker roast beans and 9 bar flat profiles for 25 to 30 second extractions) the results will probably not be much different.