Coffee Appreciation

This one did...

How do you find your La Pavoni?
I'm considering getting a Europiccola.

Mignons take a long time to run in, they clump a lot for the first few dozen kilos which adds to the retention. That’s probably a couple of years in most domestic situations but then they’re great. If your local roaster has any QC fail stuff to get rid of it’s worth running a few kilos through to run it in.

Ha, I'm consuming way less than a kilo a month! I need to get beans tomorrow anyway so I'll do as you say and ask the boss for his shit beans... 😂

Maybe not a tablespoon, but a few grams (between 2-3 I'd guess) is the norm in the sorts of grinders I worked with in coffee shops. It's a tricky thing to measure directly and I'd be surprised if the Sage only holds a quarter of a gram. That's lower than both the Niche Zero & Baratza Sette which are the go-to for low retention grinders without spending ridiculous money.

There's also the point that not all retention impacts the coffee equally. The stale grounds left in the chute will have a much bigger impact than the stale coffee that ends up getting compressed and caked in all the nook & crannies. Given that the former will be stale coffee that ends up in your new shot, the latter will not.

I found this to be a pretty decent overview: https://clivecoffee.com/blogs/learn/grind-retention

With a little photographic blower, I generally get <0.1 g retention in the Mazzer, so that weight in = weight out exactly. I'm fairly fastidious with blowing it all clear.

Yep, my Iberital is terrible for retaining grounds when clean but when I let the insides fill up with old stuff, it's almost zero retention in terms of g in to g out. I tend to run a few beans through before first shot in an effort to ensure as little of the coffee which can actually move is old, and am then happy to avoid regularly cleaning it bar the odd bit of burr cleaning granules.

Used to use one of those in a coffee shop and the little chutes are generally full of the last shot's grounds, so a little blower would pretty much eliminate that I imagine. Can definitely see that become a packaged feature of many grinders in the years to come.

Yep, I guess it's one of those things that's come down to numerical comparisons due to the ease of comparison. But the numbers used aren't always representative of what's happening. A good finger in the air comparison is if you have to significantly change the grind, how far off is the intermediate shot between one with all coffee ground and the old setting, and all coffee ground at the new setting. Not useful to plug into a grinder-comparison chart but a lot more useful of an actual measure.

If you look back on the thread you can see the single dose mod I put on, so I have easy access to the chute to blow it completely clean - it would deffo retain a big chunk otherwise. You'd get the same in/out but at least a g or so would be from the previous dose left in the chute.

I'd be surprised if the Sage only holds a quarter of a gram.

I measured it by shaking the grinder out and collecting what fell out after grinding my morning coffee. Is that an unreliable way of doing it?

Love blowing my chute clean...

I'd imagine so (granted, I've not done it that way myself so couldn't give an informed opinion), especially if you want to compare grinders. I think most of the numbers reported against grinders are either:

• Starting with a completely cleaned out machine, run a shot through and measure how much is retained (not sure how representative this is of the actual day-to-day retention but it's an easy figure to compare)
  
• Starting with a completely cleaned out machine, running a fixed amount of coffee through it (normally quite a few shot's worth), then completely cleaning down the machine measuring all coffee held (again, arguably not representative either as coffee that is caked along the inside of the grinder will have a much smaller impact than coffee resting in the chute)
  
  

Like has been said above, as machines accumulate caked in grounds their retention will improve so it's not unexpected that a machine's weight-in vs weight-out retention could drop from a few grams to zero as it's used.

Basically what I'm trying to say is, the easy to compare methods aren't representative (IMO) and the valuable ones are hard to measure (again, IMO). Not sure if I can offer much in the way of actual valuable insight but for me I just picked a machine with a design that I figured would minimise the retention (very little caked in build up due to small burrs and nowhere else really for to rest, and coffee passing straight through top to bottom meaning no chutes or similar to hold grounds), so I can basically not have to think about it.

Apologies for the wall of text with basically no meaningful conclusion

For a casual home barista this is pretty realistic I'd imagine:

1. use the grinder normally for a while
   
2. grind 18g of green/light beans
   
3. grind 18g of dark beans
   
4. look at how much light coffee there is in the dark dose
   
   

My flatmate uses my (Sage) grinder as well as me and we use different beans. By eye the amount of his ground coffee that comes out when I grind mine is pretty small.

Perhaps you could do something clever with dye or flour or UV or sieving or magnets or something but I'd be wary of changing the clumping behaviour

I don't have appropriate beans in at the moment - someone give it a go and let's see what we can see?

Assuming we're talking about the Sage Smart Grinder here. Going on how much everyone says their grinders retain, I think the Sage is very low retention in comparison. When I started using the one at work I was expecting to tip out buckets of retained grounds, but in fact hardly anything comes out even after shaking and banging and tipping upside down.

I like it a lot! With some experimentation it makes consistently great coffee. It’s not the most convenient, and you have to be quite meticulous sticking to a method. Mine is a middle 60’s model, with a solid brass piston and group - it’s a bit more temp stable than some of the ones that followed apparently.

My Mazzer probably retains about a gram of loose grounds in the chute. I pop the top off the doser and brush it out after I grind. Problem solved.

Try an experiment for grind retention:
Grind some coffee now, leave it to go stale for a week or 2.
Prepare a cupping session. 8g coarse coffee to 150ml water.
Make the 1st cup with 7.5g fresh coffee and 0.5 stale. Make the next one 7g/1g, 6g/2g and so on.
Get someone to jumble them up so it’s blind. (Mark the bottom of each cup)
Taste them to see how much stale coffee it takes before it tastes bad. Extrapolate that to an espresso recipe (you can pretty much just double it so if it’s the 6g/2g cup then that equates to 4g retained coffee being dumped in a 16g dose.)
Obviously you’re not getting the same extraction in cupping that you are in espresso but hopefully you will be able to conclude that you really don’t need to worry much about it.

Can't believe I've slept on espresso tonics for such a long time. Maaaaaaaan. So good.

I'm a big cold brew fan but I'd much rather have some decent espresso & tonic!

Yeah, thought of you when I first made one! Slice of lemon, Fever-Tree over ice. A nice medium-light roasted espresso. Proper.

Haven't tried it with lemon, shall pop a slice in the next one!

Nice opposing conversations going on in the coffee thread, enough to piss off all visitors! ;)

I said slice. I meant some peel. Just a nice strip of peel is enough.

I have a full espresso set up for sale. If anybody would like it, all in for £300 collected from SE13. Only reason for selling is because I've relocated and upgraded my whole set up. It's a pre-phillips Gaggia Classic with the silvia wand fitted and the OPV adjusted to 9 bar. Regularly backflushed and descaled by myself. It comes with both a naked and spouted portafilter plus many baskets including a flat bottomed, flat sided triple basket which is the only one I've ever used. Also comes with a blank basket for backflushing.

The grinder is an Ascaso i-1 with 54mm flat burrs with an aluminium body and brass group. Worm adjustment and with a pushbutton portafilter connection it's great for single dosing.

I'm also including all the bits and bobs like a tamper, grouphead brush, tamping mat, jug, three espresso cups and also a tightvac bean canister. It's quite a big one maybe the 750ml version? I can't remember.

so £300 all in, if anyone wants to split it I'd say £150 for the grinder, £150 for the machine and then all the other little bits I'll just deal with that if it comes to it.

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Espresso tonics are all the rage here, I’m a big fan.

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I’ve just inherited a La Pavoni Europiccola which is sort of working. Does anyone know who might be able to service it in London? I know it’s not that complex, but would be starting from absolute scratch to do it myself and am wary of biting off more than I can chew…