Sherman wrote:OT: Ian, could you clarify something?

BEFORE, I pull any shot, IF the grinder has sat for more than a few minutes, I pulse the grinder for a second or two. This ejects about 1.5 to 3g for the compost. Someday, I'm gonna run a test where I don't stop the grinder between detritus and shot.

Sherman wrote:I'm laboring under the impression that espresso roasts are roasted to within a 15°F range, and the color difference would be slight at best.

Espresso roasts can vary from light cinnamon to licorice. When making a drastic change, the 'spots' are quite visible for a shot or two, especially if the grinder is pulsed for moment and then the grounds examined.

On to today...
I wasted the last 250 125g of Supreme Bean Ring of Fire in the MC4 trying to dial in a single dose shot that equaled the last month or so pulled with the 'half hopper' load. The missus about her latte "It's a bit thin. Like coffee without a lot of flavor. Definitely not as good as they have been." I always ask her impression of her latte so she is not surprised by the query. She had no idea there was any change in the preparation. For the first time in a couple of months I decorated the front of the Vibiemme with spritzers.

And after 6 hours, I pulsed the MC4 for a 1.9g compost contribution before charging the MC4 with Caffe Fresco Black Hand. Perhaps only the Versalab is capable of sequential short interval coffee changes without contribution from the previous. On lesser grinders one can pulse till the cows come home after a shot until nothing ejects. Pulsing again several hours later can eject several grams. See Poll : One Shot Grind Remnants The 5.7 from the MXK yesterday was quite a bit more than usual. No idea why other than the normal interval is about 15 hours and yesterday was 22.

Here's a suggestion for anyone who wants to see what we're on about :
Freeze several pounds of a great coffee in small packages to maintain optimal freshness. Dial in for single dose grinding. Save your settings. Now drink this one coffee alone for several weeks, with a mini hopper and weight adjusted for 'half load'*. Tweak your shots and explore the extraction space until the nectar runneth every time. On the last ½ pound, single dose grind at the saved settings. See if you can match the 'half load' shots for flavour and ease of prep.

* half load = the height in inches of the hopper including throat X 20g or 25g for Titan grinders.
Subtract the number of shots +1 x dose necessary to cover the burrs.
If you want to top off every shot, the remainder is the weight necessary to give a half load.
If you want to top off every few shots, subtract ½ that weight.
eg. The MC4 hopper is 6in tall, so that gives me 6 x 20g = 120g
It takes 3 x 8g shots to cover the burrs, (3 +1) * 8g = 32g
I usually make about 3 shots at home in the morning 3 x 8g x ½ = 12g
Take 120 - (32 + 12) = 76g
By futzing I came up with ~75g, so the above formula seems to get us in the ballpark.
Adjust the weight as necessary because as always YMMV.

The mini hopper can be anything from a soup can to plastic bottle that fits the throat. For the weight a plastic water bottle that does not fit too tightly works a charm as it's easy to adjust the weight.

Yet another late thought - how much of this is noticeable as a single vs. double? In his first post, Ian acknowledges that he's pulling low-dose singles through an E61. I'm pulling low-dose doubles. Within the last day, I've compared Ian's methodology to my own, but pulling doubles instead of singles. No dice. I think that my next test will be to pull singles and see if a lightbulb appears over my head.

-s.

Coming in here rather late, though I followed this discussion as it unfolded.

My principal grinder for the last few months has been the Elektra Nino, an electronic doserless that doses the shots using a timer to stop shut off the motor. At this stage of affairs I haven't set the timer to something daft and just single dosed through it - something that had in fact not occurred to me until writing this post.

Although I tend to drink different beans during the day - at least two on any given day. I generally do this using different grinders. An excellent old Lehnartz manual and a Super Jolly. Recently I've been single-dosing using the latter, mainly to compare it as closely as possible with the Elektra because I'm thinking of pairing it with a bigger flat burr such as a Major.

In the past I always kept the SJ topped up to more or less the top of the throat so there was always a reasonably constant column of beans from shot to shot.

Having almost forgotten this thread, I nevertheless couldn't help noticing that the single-dosed shots didn't taste the same as the shots I had recently enjoyed using my old method to compare with the Elektra (flat burr deep and fudgy versus conical layering). So I set about filling the throat with a a two-shot dose and then filling two single baskets, pulling both and comparing the first one (ground with the very small column of beans for the second shot on top) and the second one, which was visibly different with the little chaffy bits that come through right at the end of a single shot.

Now here's what's interesting: I timed both shots (pulled on an Elektra McAL using two different identical baskets and portafilters - incidentally the coffee was a very nice Sidamo) and there was no perceptible difference in the pour. None. Zilch. What's more single dosing does not appear to have affected consistency for me. But there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that there was a difference in the taste of the shots, with the single dosed shot being slightly less complex. I tried this a few times (now thoroughly caffeinated) with the s-d shot first and second to make sure I wasn't getting influenced by any temperature differences, and every time there was this slight difference in complexity.

I think Sherman has a point here in that I was maybe more likely to notice this since I only drink singles (or ristrettos) black and at "low" classic Italian doses. I expect that the change in coarseness as the beans run out is exponential toward the end and the higher the dose the less noticeable the effect would be. It might also be less noticeable in less complex beans. But it's certainly a significant enough difference for me. Which is a shame, since I was getting quite fond of the whole single-dose ritual, which certainly makes a dosered machine less of a fiddle.

Anyway, that's my tuppenceworth.

Cheers

Mike

michaelbenis wrote: ... I nevertheless couldn't help noticing that the single-dosed shots didn't taste the same as the shots I had recently enjoyed

... So I set about filling the throat with a a two-shot dose and then filling two single baskets, pulling both and comparing the first one (ground with the very small column of beans for the second shot on top) and the second one ...

... there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that there was a difference in the taste of the shots, with the single dosed shot being slightly less complex. I tried this a few times (now thoroughly caffeinated) with the s-d shot first and second to make sure I wasn't getting influenced by any temperature differences, and every time there was this slight difference in complexity.

You did all this without blinding the baskets? The difference between allaying doubts by experiment or by a self suggestion rigmarole is that self suggestion never sticks for long. I swear it on a stack of lie detectors

Quite right, Jim. Not blind or double blind. Just little old me on my own.

So..... I'm not offering this as a cast iron conclusion, nor will I be publishing it alongside the recent Illy water study, just offering my experience to the group.

<tone change to more serious>

I found the difference sufficiently "big" and consistent to be worthy of comment, however, and it has certainly made me think about how I do and will do things.

Just as I was surprised at how well the SJ stacked against the Elektra - I certainly wasn't expecting that.. so I feel a little reassured about now halving my tongue too prompted by my head.

<tone change to much less serious - after all it is now Saturday night here>

That said, I do have an inkling that pirouetting with a rare earth magnet strapped to my head and wearing my hair in pigtails will eliminate any possibility of channeling for good. I am not, however, sure all psychics will agree

Happy weekendings!

Mike

My point is simple. If you're going so far as to prepare two baskets to compare, why not take the extra 30 seconds of marking them with a sharpie, unobtrusively below the outside lip, and shuffling them before making the shots.

Do that over the course of a week, five or six times, and you will know for certain whether there is a big difference. I define a big difference as equally large as switching between two coffees or roasts. Most changes in already competent techniques, machines, or grinders do not result in big differences. This is why I simply have stopped believing "I tried this and it's better" reports from competent people with competent equipment. Alas, you've reached a stage where improvements do not come this easily anymore.

Medium differences, about the same scale as normal shot to shot variation, will take several weeks and usually over thirty trials to nail. This is usually the scale of the difference one gets when experienced people make successful changes to their machines, grinders or technique.

Small differences are not really accessible in home testing.

Sorry if I sounded like I wasn't accepting your point, Jim. It is well made and I understand the reasoning.

The difference in appearance of the grind between a single dose grind and a penultimate dose or whatever else I could call it is pretty obvious to the eye.

What I wil try doing is to rope in my long-suffering wife (Italian - prefers blends to SO and Moka to espresso....) to load the PF in the Elektra and then tell me only after which is which....

I'm quite prepared to be embarrassed - which would be highly amusing considering how "obvious" I found the difference.....

michaelbenis wrote: The difference in appearance of the grind between a single dose grind and a penultimate dose or whatever else I could call it is pretty obvious to the eye.

Suggesting that they aren't the same is pretty good science. I've done my own experiments, and mine were fairly far away form my expectations, and what I really wanted to be happening, so I'm fairly certain that self suggestion played little or no part in my results.
I tend to dose per shot, by weight. If I'm in a hurry to leave, I will dose twice, and pull twice into the same cup and head out the door. I've had to change my technique, simply because the first shot ran fast, and the second shot ran 'normal'. My new technique of dosing the first shot and then closing the guillotine on the hopper and dosing the second on top of that has solved the problem.
My conclusion is that the second shot, without the weight above it, gets ground a bit finer at the end.
Is it science? I dunno. It is, however, conclusive enough to use in my kitchen. It shows that, in my kitchen, with my kit, at may house, when I use it, these things occur and I can change them. If any of this helps any of you, yer welcome.

These results (if I understand you correctly) are at odds with my experience. As a TGP sideline, I timed equally-dosed shots at the same grind setting, to see how a weighted bean column compared to a single dose in the grinder. The single-dosed shots poured 25-30% faster than those ground with a mass of beans on top. These differences were significant enough for me to stop dosing per shot in the grinder.

No, I did not base this decision on taste in the cup. Without a bean mass in the grinder, gross changes in pour characteristics are readily apparent. These grinders were designed to run with a large bean mass. Draw your own conclusions.

Well, I did the bits of paper under the basket trick. For someone with an attention span that would disgrace a goldfish this actually worked quite well, since mixing the ground coffee made it visually nearly indistinguishable.

On the downside, I had shifted from the Mexican SO I was drinking to a Monsooned Malabar, which I thought would be slightly less complex and therefore less likely to reveal differences. In the end it proved quite the opposite, being very sensitive to the differences in grind discussed, but not as I had expected.

So, comically enough, after all this, I needn't have worried or indeed bothered.

The Elektra was nicely up to temperature and I was using two separate portafilters at the same temperature to exclude as many variables as possible.

The result? I got one quite well-delineated but slightly overextracted cup and one somewhat less-well-delineated but underextracted cup. Predictably the slightly overextracted cup was the first of the two doses measured into the grinder and the underextracted was the final single dose. The dose in each case was checked and an identical 7.6 grammes. The pours were fine and the appearance in the cup was not noticeably different, though I didn't look closely since I didn't want to be influenced by the appearance, but only the taste. The difference between the shots was much greater than any inter-shot variations I get with eh SJ and Elektra - in fact shot consistency is very high.

So what can I conclude?

Nothing at all from this with these beans at this time. The difference in grind was too great. I would need two identical grinders set slightly differently. In my opinion the difference in delineation was solely related to the underextraction and I would hesitate to attribute it to anything more subtle about single-shot grinding. It's a shame the Mexican has run out, though I do have some more on order.

Cheers

Mike

PS: FWIW my experience squares with John's, that the grind gets coarser towards the end of the single-dose shots without bean weight above.