What about alignment?

Got mine today. Let it come up to room temp before messing with it.



First impression is that it's seriously a feat of both design and engineering. Very user friendly construction and operation, very beautiful, and VERY solid. regarding the grind adjustment, I found mine to be a tiny bit rough, so I followed the directions for cleaning and wiped all threads (there has been coffee run through these, part of the QC protocol I'd assume). That said, it's still a threaded adjustment which has tension on it from the upper burr assembly, so I think the smoothness of adjustment is largely limited by that. As it wears it may get smoother. Regarding "setting slip", I don't think it's likely/possible due to this same design. All of the rotating components are physically decoupled from the adjustment (with occurs on the stationary upper burr), so there's no interface through which to transmit any amount of torque. I suspect this will be a non-issue.

The first thing I did after that was check my "chirp point" (burrs touching), as the sticker from assembly comes placed to indicate full burr lock as opposed to initial light contact (and obviously operation in between those two points, especially at higher RPM, would be bad).

After moving the sticker, I set the RPM to 1250 (8 out of 9) dialed -3 whole numbers down from chirp point (which itself is ~1.7 settings coarser than full lock) and ground an 18g dose for the Flair. Getting the last 2g or so out was a bit messy (and they come out of the chute in "logs" ), but I didn't use ANY RDT, and I also assume this will clean up as it seasons and breaks in. The provided tools are a nice touch, and though I can't use the 58mm funnel, the dosing cup does fit almost perfectly with the Flair Pro's basket. I groomed with their WDT tool and found it worked very well.





After getting the basket loaded, I pulled the shot. Based on look and feel, this grind was just a TOUCH finer than where I was on the Kinu M47 yesterday with the same dose and coffee, and (pretty much as expected), it flowed much faster.

For shot #2, I tightened it a generous ~1.2 settings and got a slow pull from the Flair. somewhere in the middle there would have been perfect, but this was the tail end of the bag and I used the remaining ~13g at 2 (350rpm) to grind what I assumed would be ok for a small wave 155 (it was set ~6 numbers from chirp). It definitely looked a bit fine, but I proceeded nonetheless and it flowed relatively OK. It did look pretty muddy though, so I'll have to check alignment next with the marker test.

Taste wise, I can't really comment yet, but nothing was a drain pour, and most interestingly the fast shot was devoid of the sort of spikes in acidity that I would have expected from the M47 on a similar shot. I'll have a fresh bag tomorrow and plan on doing some more side-by-sides with the M47, helor (my previous pourover grinder), and the Lagom.


it just poured out that way

All in all, impressions are very good. I have a couple minor concerns and I have to get used to a new workflow coming from handgrinders, but the FUD surrounding this thing should be considered put to rest.

Very nice first impression.
I like the silver.

Looks good in silver too, thanks for your review.

The distribution tool looks very similar to the Londinium tool. I have the Londinium one and it works very well.

Great first impression review and excellent photos.

noamsh wrote:What about alignment?

This would be nice to know.

Would it be ill-advised to get this only as a brew grinder? Love the design.

When you can live with the fact that you can load just 40g into the funnel, it should work well. The grinder has the SSP brew burrs.

Anyone care to shoot a short video of the 'logs' as they come out?

The logs and static ceased with a couple spritz from the bottle. I stopped doing RDT with my handgrinders at one point, and will likely be able to once the Lagom is broken in, but for now it helps immensely.

Some info/discussion on burrs alignment:

I was hoping the marker trick would show easily what alignment is like, but unfortunately these burrs do not have any flat finished contact surface (despite feeling and maybe looking that way at first glance from above, if you look at them from the side, you can see the edge is serrated).

So the only easily accessible info I have to go on is output, audible noise, and the offset of the "rub point" vs "lock point".

Perusing the German coffee forum linked above, I noted that user "Sonus" had issues grinding fine enough, which kicked a foray into alignment with this grinder.

It seems that, once they had it aligned (the process of which still isn't 100% clear to me - something lost in translation), they had wonderful results (using Johnathan Gagne's particle analysis tool, which I was able to get running on my workstation when he released it, so I suspect I'll have some analysis to do later).

They noted in that forum that the aligned grinder had a burr rub offset from full lock of "0.6". Mine is currently ~1.2, or twice that; Locks at ~5.2, chirp at ~6.2-4 (it seems to vary based on RPM and humidity/temp a little bit). That said, this metric is not yet borne out by any further data, really.

User "brewno" from the same forum/discussion reports that his offset to rub is 1.8, yet he - like me - has nothing glaringly obvious with grounds themself, like not being able to grind for espresso.

Though I "only" have a Flair (not a pump machine), I don't believe that I'd have any trouble getting a properly flowing shot on a flow/pressure profiled commercial (and likely could choke it too).

For relation, I was able to drop my dose in the Flair Pro down 3 whole grams to 15.5g, and at 1.6 from the rub point (i.e. still plenty of room to tighten grind without contact) I was able to get a super slow shot (4 bar pre for 25s, ramp to 9 bar and slowly decline 40g out in 1:30 total). Anyone who owns a Flair Pro knows that's a pretty low dose esp with very light SO coffee.

That said, I'm only just really getting to the point where I'm comfortable just making coffee with it and paying attention to *that* experience rather than fiddling with the grinder for 20 minutes before and after.

Another small note is that at least two of us have cosmetic issues with the lower (rotating) SSP burr, but have been assured that it is purely cosmetic and 100% fully functional and it's longevity intact.

I suppose I ought to take some pics of the grounds and analyse them now, but I really just want to enjoy a coffee for once ...