Hey Folks,

This is my first post here. I've been living off pour overs and cold brews for about 12 years with my rocky grinder but my wife suggested we take our honey moon fund we never spent and get a real home cafe setup.

Anyway, we got a GS3 AV that was used then rebuilt and a lightly used Ceado e37S grinder. We're very excited about both and trying to get comfortable with all the subtleties of extraction and drink preparation.

My question today is in regards to grinders settling into moves. I've noticed that every time I adjust my grind, if I do two in a row between extractions, I end up overshooting because the first grind after an adjustment isn't a realistic view of what my adjustment was. It's different and close but it takes a couple grinds to full settle into the adjustment. Is this normal? I'm just trying to figure it all out. That being said I've only ground about 8 or 10 lbs on this grinder so far and was told by the prior owner he only pulled a dozen shots on it despite the shot counter reading closer to 100.

Thanks for your responses in advance.

This is one of the reasons a low-retention grinder is popular among home baristas who don't pull hundreds of shots with the same coffee and effectively the same grind. The first grinds out of a grinder with high retention will be from the old setting (or bean).

Blowing out the grinder with a puffer or bellows can help with a grinder with significant retention. Another approach is to grind through 10-20 g and discard it. Alas, either way you lose at least as many beans as the grinder's retention. Note that 18 g in and 18 g out doesn't mean "zero retention". You might just be uniformly pushing old grinds out with the new.

(Even with a Niche Zero, I use a puffer.)

Interesting. No one tells you these things. The Ceado E37S is supposed to be pretty low retention as it's slightly changed brother is their single dosing grinder but I guess I just have to pull a few shots before I settle into any setting. I just don't think my wife would ever be cool with the extra work of dosing every shot she has to pull for herself so I went with a timed dosing grinder instead of single dosing.

This is normal as Jeff was saying. Retention is likely the cause of it taking more than one shot to "settle in". As long as adjustment is not moving, the less likely of the two, I just purge about 6-8g after each change. Once dialed it's much easier because you're not changing settings much at all, but you'll still want to purge some in the morning if it had been sitting a while.

Yes, all of the above. I have the same grinder, and it is quite low retention, but a (very) short purge is certainly needed to reflect adjustment. If making fine changes and tolerant of espresso that's 'good enough,' you may opt to see what the second shot after a change does before making another shift.
The first shot of the morning will also benefit from a small purge, but this, again, will depend on your tolerance. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. It's always good espresso, but sometimes it's better.