Re: Coffee grinder (burr type) recommendation?

Felix <felixyen@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

| We often have to choose between imprecise measurements that matter and
| precise ones that may not. In this case, there are so many variables
| influencing cup quality, the measurement should be taken many times to
| ensure that other factors aren't masking the grinder's contribution.
| Otherwise, the evidence is merely anecdotal.

It this vein it can be argued that much if not most expert knowledge is
anecdotal. (I don't mean to suggest by this that I myself am an expert
here, BTW!) The word "merely" is a pejorative with which I do not agree.

This has ben a running controversy in all the years I've been participating
on the coffee newsgroups, and probably for decades before that. There is an
art and a science to coffee (and every other kind of cooking), and while
metrology in support of the art is a great thing, I am firmly in the camp
which believes that the art is king. That may change with time (just as
computers have finally become unarguably better than humans at chess), but
we're nowhere near there yet. For example, I would rather frequent a cafe
with a skilled barista wielding an MDF and a $1000 espresso machine, than a
shop with a tyro using a Swift and a Marzocco. In fact, for a while I was a
regular customer at a cafe of the latter type; while the espresso was always
beautiful, it was very mediocre to the palate. (I only went there for
social and convenience reasons.)

| A size distribution comparison would reveal the relative presence of
| very small particles, which isn't a quality measurement per se, but
| it's a start. Furthermore, why should we consider grind quality and
| size distribution to be unrelated?

I'd expect many different grind profiles to produce excellent espresso. In
particular, I would expect a flat-burr grinder and a commercial conical of
comparable quality to have rather different-looking grain distributions.

That doesn't mean that knowing what these distributions are isn't of
interest; moreover, in the case that one grinder is not as good in practice
as another, it might help diagnose the reason.

However, in the case of the MDF vs. the Mazzer, my opinion is not *just*
based on drink quality, but *also* on the fact that they both use similar
burrset technology, of similar burr qualty. These two considerations
reinforce one another.

- David R.
--
Less information than you ever thought possible:
http://www.demitasse.net
.

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