As part of my grinder shopping (and this isn't about which grinder to buy) I'm trying to expand my choices by not relying on single dosing. Why? Because man it's a pain. Wrestling with the Airscape every morning is like my least favorite thing. "Grind and go" is really starting to appeal.

But why was I doing it? Because I wanted to keep the coffee as fresh as possible. I basically pull two shots a day - my morning cortado and my partner's cappuccino. And even when we're on the same beans we're going through coffee fairly slowly. (A recent diagnosis of Meniere's Disease had me off caffeine for a while, but as far as I can tell it hasn't helped so screw it. A single espresso can't kill me. But I was single dosing regular for him and decaf for me.) I'd say we go through a bag about every two weeks. I'm assuming that keeping it in the Airscape helps.

How do you balance out keeping the coffee fresh while keeping enough beans in the hopper to make your grinder happy? Or have I been single dosing for a dumb/bogus reason?

I used to single dose the beans, but have moved to keeping a rolling three days worth in the hopper.

I usually get a very freshly roasted bag, split it into two and freeze half in a vacuum container. The other half goes into a regular ceramic canister on the counter. I keep some decaf and regular. It's just me drinking coffee. I normally have 1 or 2 regular and 1 decaf a day. I just take the frozen beans out before I run out and let them come up to room temperature before opening the vacuum container. So far, I've seen no harm come from it.

I single dose all the time, weighing in an electronic gram scale using the Vario lid as a tray for weighing.

Done this for so many years I can basically do it in my sleep.

Some say the beans are at their best in 3 days, some say 10. It isn't that critical, but the frozen ones seem about as good as the day they went in the freezer.

I think we worry about this stuff too much.

I don't single dose. I always put maybe 200-300g of beans in the hopper. I just hate measuring beans each time before putting it in the grinder. I think people single dose for 2 reasons:

1. They don't want to waste coffee
2. They want to be able to switch beans easily

For me, I don't switch beans very often. I buy from my local Whole Foods. They have freshly roasted coffee in bulk food bins with the roast date clearly marked. the roasts run the gamut from light to very dark. I usually buy somewhere in the middle.

As far as wasting coffee, I think some people just don't like the idea of waste. I think some people don't like the idea of throwing money away (especially if they paid quite a bit for the beans). I don't have much of an issue with it because I just accept it as part of the cost of brewing espresso at home. Plus I end up paying $13 / lb at Whole Foods. A far cry from the $16+/lb from some of the roasters and I don't have to pay shipping. So I don't feel too bad about purging 6g or more at a time.

I have to purge more with the Mazzer Major than I did with the Baratza Vario. So I end up buying a slightly larger bag of beans from Whole Foods.

If you don't mind purging and if you don't switch beans often... I don't see why you wouldn't load the hopper.

Put the smallest amount of beans into the hopper that will hold down the popcorn effect plus 2 doses. Then each day add the amount into the hopper that you used for that day. In the morning grind a few grams and toss as that will be the stale grounds from the day before. Most hoppers will operate properly with very little beans inside. Good luck.

I single dose, almost exclusively. I generally have 2-5 different coffees roasted at any given time, and I like to be able to switch between them flexibly over the course of a day. Too much consistency gets boring. Most of my grinders are designed to be single dosed (HG-1, Bunzilla,etc.), and the workflow is pretty fast when this is the case.

I do have one hopper-fed, weight-based-dosing grinder, a Preciso/Esatto, at work for when life gets really busy and I'm spending long hours in the office. But most of the time even that gets single-dosed, as I don't like to tie my hands to finish what is in the hopper, and I hate the waste of purging the half-way ground beans sitting in the throat at the start of each day.

For me, single dosing isn't about freshness. It's about habit and what suits my needs. I tried to get away from single dosing and simplifying my prep. I have a k10 that I bump-n-grind and all that jazz. I grew tired of the process after many years.

I bought a K30 Vario about a year ago and immediately started to love the ability to just walk up to the grinder and push a button for dosing. Mind you, I still needed to dial-in the grinder and have the 'right' amount of beans in the hopper to get the right dose. Getting rid of the single dose prep for each shot made pulling shots simpler and I was very happy for the first few days. I even posted about the beauty and simplicity of 'grind and go' with the K30 on H-B. I was all too happy.

Then, my habits and coffee use started to make cracks in the shiny veneer of hopper/timed-dosing simplicity. The first hard pill to swallow was that I could only use one coffee at a time. I don't need this capability, but I had grown accustomed to being able to switch coffees at will. The second reality-check was inconsistent results if you didn't manage the hopper volume well. When I got to the end of a bag I felt like I was screwed. I just chased the ideal shot until the bag was gone. This bothered me a lot. I don't want to manage the hopper volume! The third and final nail in the coffin was that a tweak to the grind size needed a purge or multiple purges if the initial tweak was off. I finally decided that hopper dosing was just too finicky for me. It's great if you can always walk up to the grinder, dose and pull without tweaking, but my reality was such that I felt like I was mostly chasing the ideal shot. After about 5 days of exclusively hopper/timed dosing, I went back to my K10 and felt immediate relief at the flexibility it afforded me, regardless of the extra things I had to do before each shot.

Sold the K30 Vario ASAP. I'm still using my K10 and single-dosing.

I realize this experience is mostly unique to me and my habits/needs. It should give you an idea, however, of the 'pains' of hopper dosing.

I single dose on my Fiorenzato Doge because I must. It came without a second capacitor, which I'll get around to installing one of these days so I can run it with a hopper on it. But even then I would single dose because I'm almost exclusively drinking home roasts these days and like to go between different coffees on different machines. I also single dose on my Voodoodaddy Pharos because that's what it's made for. Once they've reached peak I freeze my roasted coffee in airtight mason jars and grind them right out of the freezer.

There's a recent thread on hopper versus single dosing. It looks to me like most people favoring hopper dosing are using pump machines.

Effect of hopper loading on grind distribution - by Socratic Coffee

I'm using almost all levers. On my Conti Prestina, the shot is finessed by the declining pressure profile. It's hard to get a bad shot. For my other levers pulling a shot is an analog skill. If I want to fine tune a coffee I'm concentrating on doing that on my roaster these days, a North TJ-067 with a perforated drum. To perfect a shot profile, say for a H-B coffee review I'll dial it in on the Prestina using a cheap digital scale, an old stopwatch, the offset PID temperature control and either of these two grinders. I can still distinguish the flavors just fine.

So no, I'm not going to talk you out of single dosing. It works for me!

I prefer the extra time I saved (I used to have an HG1, which took forever for two shots...IME). My pulls are much more consistent (could also be the new grinder as well). I also started keeping one coffee around and if I do need to switch I'm not bothered by a 10-15g purge.

I also stopped ordering online and use whole foods, which has better prices. They have fresh roast date coffees from all the Chicago roasters and they are usually a few bucks cheaper than at the shop.