Coffee Appreciation

My wife would rather have her cotton candy dunked in espresso.
I'd rather do without the cotton candy.

Looks like it would also rain down on your handle and everything else

Just sticky, sticky, stickiness everywhere and no way to get it off your fingers!

Oh and they blatantly plagiarised the MTV logo!

Live, Laugh, Love thread >>>>>>>>>>>>

I do bastard blend most of the time, but sometimes if I'm feeling like lots of faff I'll make two cafetières or one cafetière and one Aeropress.

As a result of our home method of weighing after grinding, sometimes leftover ground beans stay in the container, and my wife will just grind the new beans on top, but not use all of it. So the bastard blend continues for a few days, which is less than ideal.

Reads like a very good advertorial.

That's what I thought. I appreciate their working with indigenous people, and the under canopy stuff but the vagueness of the description of their competitors winds me up. What they're doing is good, obviously, but I feel like they're just comparing themselves to Nescafe or whatever, as if all other coffee production is completely destructive and exploitative.
The fact that the Easy Joe website has a line about how they don't offer instant coffee yet is a bit of a red flag in terms of their intended market - well meaning Guardian readers, who aren't that into coffee perhaps.

People with a Technivorm, how are you stopping yourself making an unhealthy amount of coffee every morning?

I am back on the Technivorm hype.

A thermos flask (well Kinto bc Im bougie)

*not implying your wife is a raccoon.

Ha!

Just for anyone that is saddened by this animal cruelty. He does eventually figure it out at 59 seconds.

https://youtu.be/eesxH2-8Jlo?t=59

Can’t you just make less?

So I bought a new pulley and motor and now the Vario is back grinding but I cannot get it to grind fine enough - have gone through all of the threads I can see on this.

I have two options - buy some new burrs, fit and see if this works. Keep trying to find the problem.
Or
Sell it as it is to someone who might be able to find the solution.

If the Niche zero were available I'd do the 2nd without doubt.

Not sure if it's a viable option (no idea on the internals of the Vario), but are you not able to add some sort of spacers to bring the burrs closer together? My Sette came with a few spacers for tweaking that. I realise they're different machines of course!

There's a grub screw which you can use to adjust the burrs - with the machine running I can turn this and get the burrs to come into contact (judging by the Noise) Baratza say that this should occur on the setting 2-Q. This was how I used to have the grinder setup but even with this the beans are grinding not fine enough and inconsistent. Quite a pita at this point

That sounds pretty rough, is there any damage to the burrs that you can see? Seems odd that the burrs are touching but still not grinding fine enough.

What grinder do people use for espresso? Whenever I look at a review for a reasonably priced grinder it basically says it fine enough for espresso 🤷🏼‍♂️

Electric or manual?
Budget?

they are not doing anything more special or not that anyone else as far as i can see.

direct trade is a tricky subject, it has no clear definition and very few are able to handle everything, there is usually another actor involved for finance/shipping/milling etc...

as for the shade grown aspect , The FNC (National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia) spent decadse telling Colombian farmers not to plant shade in order to increase yield and are now backtracking to some degree, brazil is the ultimate example of this, huge open farms with minimal shade, coincidentally Brazil and Colombia are two of the largest producers interms of metric tonnes.

Ethiopia is wild coffee grown in Forests, same in parts of Chiapas/Oaxaca in mexico and virtually all of Timor Leste. What is old is new and if this is picked up as a marketing tool will be interesting. Especially as this means less yield for the farmer, but will the price paid reflect this?

Electric

I could stretch to £100 and don’t mind second hand

it can be, but what those trees are are crucial, are they a secondary crop or a subsistence crop? how do they work agronomically? The title of the piece is click baity and there is little evidence to show that shade grown coffee is of better quality across the board than non shade grown, too many other factors are at play

Agree on the advertorial nature of it and I notice that there is not mention of the price paid to the producers apart from to claim £9,50 a bag is expensive, which it isnt. £9.50 is cheap, very cheap when considering the costs all the way up the value stream from the producers.

true, it also won't be them per se working on the ground with the producers, that will be an intermediary or an ngo. I know a couple of these, one of whom works in Peru.

For clarity my day job is working for a green coffee company. We're a CIC and work as exporters and importers in Colombia, Rwanda, Burundi, Mexico and Timor Leste.

a lot of the easyjose website is endemic of the issues with speciality coffee as a whole. a lot of white saviour photos and text about how they are helping through trade but very little substance.

Talk of transparency is well and good but needs to be backed up with numbers open to scrutiny, these numbers should include costs at all parts of the value stream and not just at the producing end, we at the consuming end of the stream should bear that burden too.

I think you'd struggle with that budget for electric, but more informed voices will step in.

See if you can find a second hand Vario or Sage grinder. A rancillio Rocky will also do it.

Unfortunately at £100the budget is tight for anything half decent