Getting better and better beans is very hard. You’re stuck with what is available. You’re stuck with what water is available (if you’re a reasonable person). You’re stuck with the local roasters.
So of the variables you can control, the grinder is the most important piece of equipment you can buy.
Again. Grinders can make a difference, but they’re the last step in the chain. Do everything else first.
The fact is, there is a certain level of spend needed. If you’re not making espresso, this is very low these days. You can get very cheap, good gear. If you are making espresso, you’re spending several hundred minimum. Although you can lower your spend quite a bit if you’re willing to hand grind for espresso.
As you said, once you are dialed in, really the only variable I am tweaking per bag of beans is the grind.
For one, controlling the other variables is an obvious step you need to take when testing the effect of particle size. For two, it doesn’t follow that the OP is magically correct in his hypothesis about the affect of grind size just because he thought of this step and works in industry.
Also - is controlling the other variables actually obvious to most as you say? Are those variables even easily identified by the average home coffee maker? I'm not so sure.
So no, the fact that you claim to have spent a decade professionally controlling the water temperature, bean roast,ratio, brew time & process, and grind level, does not make you any more knowledgable than any one of the other million nerds (including myself) who do this on a daily basis as well. Yes, controlling all of the variables when taste testing is obvious to most coffee geeks (people responding here). Americas test kitchen has been doing this for decades with recipes that have many more variables than the coffee brewing process.
No, those variables are probably not easily identified by the average home coffee maker. That’s because the average coffee maker is a boomer with a keurig. I still don’t think it was a particularly insightful comment though, regardless of this fact. This forum is not made of keurig drinking boomers.
It’s easy to like something though when that something’s “taste” (when drilled down into the realm of unrealities) is largely social. That’s why John Manzo noted as such in coffee, connoisseurship, and an ethnomethodologically-informed sociology of taste.
His little startup company ended up getting bought by one of the large coffee companies.
Above the $200 range really only matter for espresso. Manual brews don't need that fine grind precision, just consistency (no fines, no rocks) at medium grind levels.
People who own v60s tend tie the promotion of v60s to their personal character so i know this might fall flat but; every real study ive seen, thats blind, has shown no no added benefit to slightly more consistent grounds. Ive noticed the same when testing between the two myself. Feel free to share otherwise if you have data to support that ;)
I don't doubt you but would like to read it and try to confirm my bias anyway!
My experience is mainly with completely crap grinders vs high-end burrs which is very distinguishable. Probably low/mid end burrs do okay as long as there aren't too many fines. Grind size variability may even be advantageous :)
The one i know of was done by Americas test kitchen. I had read and/or watched another a while back but couldn’t find it. Good luck with your cuppa - continue to enjoy the ritual.
With a spice mill, it's a total crap shoot if a grind will pull properly, blast through or block up completely. It is a challenge to always get a good grind.
A burr grinder? If it's the same beans, it is set and forget. Always the same grind, same pull, easy.
If there is any taste difference, I suspect it is down to consistency of the grind and not much else.
Now take a bit of both grinds and mix those together and brew them. You will find it is both bitter and sour.
If you want to avoid placebo, simply perform a double blind test.
James Hoffman has plenty of videos demonstrating this, even on himself. He tests many methods, machines, and beans. The things the community says matter he can reliably detect in a double blind test. Other things typically show no effect.
Don't forget, this isn't just Reddit. People have been brewing coffee for centuries. There are many professionals and lifelong tradespeople. There are definitely things that matter for making a good brew and particle size is one of them.
You are giving me advice as though I havent been "dialing in" my coffee for over a decade. Of course if you brew two different coffees with 100% different particle sizes, you will get different results. This is an exaggeration fallacy. It is not the same test as having 95% of one particle size vs 5% of another, which measures the improvement you might get from upgrading a $50 grinder to a $200 grinder.
>Don't forget, this isn't just Reddit. People have been brewing coffee for centuries. There are many professionals and lifelong tradespeople. There are definitely things that matter for making a good brew and particle size is one of them.
Yeah, people have been brewing coffee for centuries. No, people have not been concerned about minuscule differences in particle sizes for centuries. The ethopian method still consists of roasting beans in what basically amounts to a cast iron pan. Dominicans still roast their beans in sugar over a fire. Both have been grinding their beans using mortar and pestle since the beginning of time, and continue to this day. Would you scoff at those, and tell them their coffee is not "dialed in"? I'm sorry, but the pretentious exaggerations over coffee particle sizes absolutely are a recent phenomenon, and that you are seriously suggesting history in support of your claims reveals an obvious level of naivety.
EDIT: Also, you should be extremely wary of "learning" from well-edited videos of taste testers such as James Hoffman whose entire livelihood depends on being a coffee personality in a world where coffee is touted as being more complex than it actually is...
It’s pretty easy to tell, although it depends a bit on how well you make the coffee.
There are substantial differences to be found in many variables of coffee brewing. Just because you don't have a palate for it doesn't mean others don't.
What I'm less convinced by is that more and more expensive grinders taste better to any noticeable and consistent degree. Personally I'd say that the taste changes day by day, maybe according to my mood, whether I brushed my teeth or ate something sweet in the last hour or two, the humidity, bean freshness, whether any defect beans got into a particular cup, and probably a ton of other factors.
I'm willing to accept that my tastes are not developed enough. But I need real double blind tests to back that up, not just people saying I should trust them because they claim to be an expert. Are there any?
Though keep in mind that his palate is especially refined. Average Joe buying a coffee at Baskin Robbins isn't going to notice the difference between different high end grinders.
Besides, I've watched a good few Hoffman videos - including his high end grinder reviews - and while they are great, they aren't scientific standard double blind tests. They're just him in his kitchen.
I did search in case I missed anything, but can't find any videos that you might mean. If you have a specific video in mind, please link it.
Maybe look more into who he actually is before dismissing him? He's a National Barista Championship winner and has decades of professional coffee experience and knowledge beyond just brewing a daily cup. He also co-founded a roasting company that became the largest wholesale specialty coffee supplier in London. It's not like he just popped onto Youtube one day in 2016 and decided to start making coffee videos.
Grab some 6 month old beans and brew them with metallic water at 85c, no grinder in the world will make that palatable.
> adjustments of a few micron at a time
Lol, no you don’t. Microns are much smaller than you think.
You absolutely do.
Many stepped grinders will have steps on the order of magnitude of 5 microns, EG-1 being probably the easiest one of the bunch to prove [1].
But note that this is talking about the difference in the _burr distance_, not the ground particle size difference.
In a world where we figured out how to make perfect burrs that produce uniform particle sizes these _might_ be the same, but even the most expensive and fanciest coffee grinders produce a relatively wide distribution of particle sizes.
Even if your coffee grinder is in a room temperature-controlled to within 1 degree, the heat output of the motor could easily cause more than 5 microns of thermal expansion.
But obviously, if the coffee tastes good to you, then that's a coffee making success regardless of how precisely you're grinding things.
The size and consistency of the ground coffee makes a huge difference in extraction of coffee and therefor the taste, so a grinder that can make a consistent, repeatable grind will be noticeable (perhaps not as noticable as purchased ground vs freshly ground), but for some the difference between instant, and fresh ground with a $50, $500, or $3000 isn't worth the price.
$50 vs $500 Vs $500,000 Coffee Grinder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkYqHWThIpA
No, it isn't nonsense. And yes, I can tell the difference between a cup of instant and a cup of freshly ground brew.
This video actually proves my point. James not only avoids tasting the coffees blind, but you can see that at 6:35 the particle volume is all basically the same size with extremely minute differences - looks like a factor of less than 10% volume density with very little distribution difference between grinders.
You see, when you make espresso there’s a pretty narrow range of grind sizes that produce acceptable coffee. Too coarse, and the water gushes through the puck without building much pressure. Too fine, and the puck essentially turns into coffee cement and the machine isn’t able to squeeze out more than a drop or two of (very bitter) espresso.
Within that narrow range you can find the needle on the water pressure gauge hitting numbers anywhere between 4 and 10 bar (I’ve set my machine’s overpressure valve to 10 bar so that excess water pressure is shunted away and circulated back into the brew circuit). I find the coffee tastes best when I can hit the sweet spot between 9 and 10 bar without the OPV kicking in. This is subject to uncontrollable factors such as differences in tamping but generally occurs at a very specific grind setting that I find after dialing in a new coffee.
As for differences in flavour? It’s all about extraction. Underextraction (from failure to reach a high enough pressure) results in sour, thin coffee. Overextraction yields very dark, bitter coffee with a powdery mouth feel. Proper extraction avoids both of these problems and tastes sublime, nutty and chocolatey (with medium-dark roasts) or fruity and juicy (with lighter roasts).
There may be a lot of gadget-headery going on in the espresso world but I can confidently say that correct grind size makes an enormous difference in the quality of coffee. Whether you need a $2000 grinder to achieve that is debatable, but you absolutely will not achieve it with a $40 blade grinder (which cannot control grind sizes at all).
If you ask the experts, much of the physics of espresso apply to pour-over coffee as well. Grind size and distribution, water flow rate through the coffee bed, channeling, fine migration and filter clogging.
Of course, the ‘typical’ coffee drinker is just looking for some caffeine with sugar and milk to help start their day, so they don’t care about this stuff. But if you make pour-overs and drink black coffee made with specialty roasts then all of this technique applies, and so a good grinder can help a lot.
Pour-over fans tend to prefer lighter roasts and flat burr (as opposed to conical burr) grinders, which are said to produce a more unimodal grind distribution with fewer fines.
Well I have to say that because I am not a pour-over drinker and I have no experience with grinders other than my Niche. I think I was pretty clear about the fact that I was relaying hear-say rather than speaking from my own experience.
That said, i find the following to be an oft-repeated bs phrase parroted across the internet. You can find it tracing back to reddit threads over ten years ago.
> You can end up with what are called fines and boulders, fines being tiny, dust-like pieces of coffee that create bitterness in the cup, and boulders being large chunks that create sourness or emptiness in the cup.
I dare any coffee drinker to blindly try their coffee with a crappy grinder, and compare to their $200 carbon fiber whatever. You wont detect the difference. I once looked into someone’s reddit account who was repeating this - and found that they were selling grinders elsewhere. Must be awesome margins.