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Have you considered / is it practical for you to roast a shop EK43 batch and a 'yourgrinderisinferiortoours' batch of some of the beans? Double the work but allows the EK43 to sing in the shop, as well as home / other businesses to make satisfying brews on their kit.
+1 If you need guinea pigs in the North West count me in, I enjoy running light roasts via mc2 & gaggia classic.
Also Fwiw North Tea Power have the EK43 so might be useful to see if they'd be interested in you sending stuff their way for more informed shop opinion?
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Interesting. Mirrors our experience when I tried a few in the shop here, good as espresso but a tad underwhelming and over-roasted as filter through the EK. Would certainly be interested to try a lighter roast!
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I sense that this is likely to divide opinion.
I like YB as your roasts are dark enough to make satisfying coffee with a domestic grinder and French press, whilst remaining very clean and smooth.
Moving to a lighter style wouldn't appeal to me.
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I'm with @ChasnotRobert on this. I hand grind your beans for french press and am not sure that the lighter roast would suit that method.
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I'd always go for a lighter roast/flavour profile as that's what I like. Obviously I don't have an EK at home but will always try to get the brighter flavours by buying those type of beans and adjusting volume/grind etc.
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Probably preaching to the more knowledgable here but...
This is potentially to do with the consistency of the EK, and the fines it produces. The uneven particle size of other grinders will give a wider variety of flavour notes, whereas the EK won't produce as many fines. Have you tried using something as tiresome as the Kruve to get consistent particle size from each grinder as see if that makes a difference? I'm just trying to throw out ideas, I'm only a basic technician so forgive me if this is obvious for you. scratches head
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Long techy post.
We just bought an EK43, it's been quite a thing. Immediately I can tell that there's more extraction going on - it is revealing layers of complexity that we've not uncovered before, but it has also given us some difficult questions to answer. The problem is that now there's an edge of roastiness to everything we brew with the EK where before we had body and softness. Playing with the espresso, the SO Peru Cajamarca which gets a lighter roast than the espresso blend tastes rounded, soft, chocolatey with abundant blackberry when ground on the old 65mm flat burr espresso grinder, but with the EK there's less body, lots more detail, but that chocolate gives way to a faint hint of carbon. We calibrate our roasting by taste, and that has been dictated in a large part by the limitations of our grinders up to now.
So as we're now able to get more extraction we need to roast lighter to exploit more of that complexity and remove the roasty hint. This figures, because at Monmouth we used to roast pretty dark by current standards but their filter brewing was all about under-extracted massive doses for big body in the drinks: 26g into 220ml in 2 minutes was the filter recipe, lower extraction conceals roast flavours.
But we have our house style, people choose us because we're not quite as light as many; those lighter bodied, lower brew strength, high extraction brews alienate many who aren't interested in coffee as a hobby, they're looking for a satisfying rich brew. Our filter drinks served in the shop will undoubtedly shine much brighter, but for retail coffee our customers don't have EKs in their kitchens and they're not going to have access to the high extraction yields necessary to make those lightly roasted coffees sparkle rather than turning out green, dusty and sour.
I'm just thinking out loud, I'd be interested to know what people think. It's really re-energised me. It does mean shit-loads of tasting, tweaking and experimenting to be done, and that's great. Fear not, we're not going to release any sour coffee.
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