I love nerding out on food as mich as the next person. On food and cooking is one of my favorite kitchen tools. Sichuan chili oil is a staple condiment in our house.
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.
A friend of mine started a company based entirely on the premise that grind quality matters. They did many blind taste tests and found that they could taste a 50μm difference in grind size when they controlled the other variables. Can you tell the difference between a $50 spice mill and a $200 burr grinder? Yes, absolutely. Can you tell the difference between that and a $1,500 expresso grinder, probably.
His little startup company ended up getting bought by one of the large coffee companies.
Even amateurs will notice the difference between a "perfect" pour over from a $50 grinder and a $200 grinder. The GP clearly does not own a V60 :)
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.
I’m sorry but what is an “amateur” coffee drinker? Is coffee drinking so complex that you can become an expert in it? Get over yourself, you’ve been drinking the koolaid, not the coffee.
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 ;)
Do you have a link to such a study? My google-fu is failing.
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 :)
It’s fascinating, isn't it? “Experts” are more than willing to dish out hundreds of dollars for finer microns and consistent particle sizes, and even measure those sizes using LASERS. They will go through the trouble to make fancy edited videos with all sorts of dubious claims about taste. But all of these people are totally unwilling to do blind taste tests and release their data, and as such we find a massive lack of real studies on the internet. People will make every excuse under the sun to not run blind taste tests on the effect of different coffee grinders. Look at this guys list of reasons… lol he states that he needs “people from around the world” in order to make such a study accurate.(https://towardsdatascience.com/double-blind-coffee-studies-a...).
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.
I don't know if there is a taste difference that's meaningful, but the consistency is probably the real difference between grinders.
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.
Tasting a difference in grind size does not equate to fine particles being “bitter” and larger particles being “flat”, nor does it result in a slightly uneven grind being “better” than a more consistent one…
The effect of fines being bitter and the coarse being sour is easy to test. Take a decent grinder and your favorite coffee. Grind one batch a couple notches finer than usual. Grind another batch coarser than usual. Brew both with the same amount and temperature of water for the same time as you normally would. Compare the flavor of both brews. This is a common step of "dialing in a brew" to get your preferred flavor. The finer grind tends to be more bitter, the coarser tends to be more sour.
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.
>Grind one batch a couple notches finer than usual. Grind another batch coarser than usual.
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...
Your argument is "I dare you; you won't notice a difference." That's not convincing. Those of us who've spent time in the industry can even detect differences between high end conical vs flat burr grinders, let alone the difference between a bladed spice grinder compared to a burr grinder.
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.
Are you aware of any blind tests done on this? I'm fully aware that I can taste the difference between my Specialita and a blade grinder.
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?
Yes. Check out James Hoffman on YouTube. He tests many machines, including grinders, using double blind taste tests, and he can reliably tell the difference between many machines.
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.
I meant by real scientists in a lab, not a YouTuber. Like a consumer testing lab maybe, or a university.
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.
> I meant by real scientists in a lab, not a YouTuber. Like a consumer testing lab maybe, or a university.
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.
It doesnt need to be convincing - I’m not the one making the claim that $200 coffee grinders make better coffee, so I’m not responsible for backing up that fact with data.
I make my morning coffee on a Lelit espresso machine. I use a Niche zero espresso grinder. I can easily tell the difference between grind sizes a mm apart on the dial, when it comes to taste in the cup (and even with milk). The espresso machine can tell the difference too, because even a minute difference in grind size can make a significant difference in the coffee puck’s ability to withstand the water pressure.
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).
Do you live in Europe by chance? When people in the USA talk about coffee they are typically not talking about espresso, which is a different beast altogether, and something I have no experience with.
I live in Canada. I’m not Italian. I only got into coffee a couple years ago.
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.
This entire paragraph reads “because the experts say so”. As an avid coffee drinker and experimenter for many years now I’d challenge you to question that “more unimodal grind distribution” effect on pour overs especially as it relates to very minor differences in distributions measured across grinders.
This entire paragraph reads “because the experts say so”
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.
Seriously? The grinder is the most important part, in my experience. When I first got into aeropress and pourovers, I was frustrated for years with bland and inconsistent brews. It was only after I upgraded to a decent burr grinder that everything fell into place. It’s just impossible to tweak anything else without first starting with a good grinder. I make adjustments of a few micron at a time with my grinder, and the difference is significant for both espresso and pour over. It’s much rarer that I make adjustments in water salts, brew temp, and brew method.
>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.
Speaking as a someone who does DIY CNC, it's easy to add an adjustment dial labelled in 5 micron steps. But those labels are basically decorative if other imprecision in the machine means adjustments aren't reliably reflected in the output.
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.
While I agree in general, a good quality burr grinder is surprisingly consistent. I'm not sure you could reliably get distinct results one notch apart, but at a given notch you will have a very narrow spread in grain sizes and a couple notches apart they will be visually distinct. James Hoffman has some videos comparing several cheap and expensive grinders, including looking closely at the grain size, and you can see the difference clearly.
Surprisingly consistent when measured using coffee that is ground to hundreds of microns is not an indicator about consistency at the few microns level. Use high quality calipers on the burrs, you’ll be shocked how much variance you see run to run at one adjustment, never mind what happens when you move the dial. Micron marks on grinders are pure marketing.
I'm more than willing to admit this being true on like... 98% of grinders out there; would be a little surprised to see that in a insanely expensive and _very_ overbuilt grinder like EG-1.
I’ve spent ten years in the specialty coffee industry (not selling grinders). If you’re controlling other variables properly you should definitely be able to tell the difference.
I think this is an important insight. Some people don’t have much experience in making repeatable coffee, and whether you make the coffee well is more important than how good the grinder is.
But once you have repeatable steps and that are good (water, quantities, temperature etc.) the grinder becomes the most important piece even in espresso.
I would say it's most important for espresso, at least in espresso machines that do everything else well. You essentially control the duration of the pull via the grind, and the taste of the shot comes predominantly from how long and hot you pull it.
As you said, once you are dialed in, really the only variable I am tweaking per bag of beans is the grind.
Not really, almost everything else matters more. Bean quality and water quality in particular are at the top of the list. Good beans bad grinder > bad beans good grinder. The grinder is the last place to look, even though it does matter.
The mistake you’re making is that not all variables are under your control.
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.
Of course they are, don’t be so helpless. Getting good beans vs Starbucks is trivial. You’re obviously not limited to local roasters, google “specialty coffee delivery”, it needs to rest for around a week anyway. As is getting filtered water (in-line under your sink for less than $100, filter pitcher for a fraction of that) and saline drops (you can buy them for next to nothing online or mad-science your own for even less). All of those things will make a huge improvement compared with a better grinder.
Again. Grinders can make a difference, but they’re the last step in the chain. Do everything else first.
The other mistake you’re making is thinking people haven’t tried all of this and this is new information to them. And that trying all that results in a product that someone else prefers.
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.
It's not an important insight at all - it's a credentials fallacy. "I was in industry so I am right". Many people have spent many years nerding out on coffee, myself included, but you'll note I don't use that as an argument for being correct.
It’s exactly what you’re talking about. The claim was “i was in industry -> therefore i know if you control the other variables you can tell the difference”.
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 effect of grind size just because he thought of this step and works in industry.
Your posts are very curious. Why do you think that the credential (10 years in the specialty coffee industry) mentioned is fallacious or somehow irrelevant? It seems to me that a decade spent finding ways to control variables and improve the quality and repeatability (both in a cafe setting and for customers with home setups) of coffee is like.. super relevant here.
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.
Look I hope I’m not insulting your profession but controlling the 5 or so variables that go into brewing good coffee is not exactly rocket science. To claim to be an expert in it is akin to claiming you are an expert in sharpening knives or picking a lock. It’s something basically anybody can take up, the rules for success follow a general formula, and if you experiment just outside of this formula you’ll find the way that works best for you. Hell, even the prices of growing, preparing (fermentation), and roasting coffee beans is infinitely more complex than the brewing process imo.
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.
So in your home coffee nerd experience coffee made from grounds with a narrow size distribution is not noticeably different than coffee made from grounds with a broad size distribution?
No, in my home coffee nerd experience the realized size distribution across multiple grinders is minimal enough that it has no effect on flavor profile. When all other variables are controlled, of course ;).
Exactly! Just like how all of the “experts” liked blade-ground coffee when it was blindly tested (https://youtu.be/O7LAzSKgeoQ?feature=shared), in what seems to be the only blind test that brings together experts on the internet. They liked it, so that’s what counts.
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.
That's nonsense unless your the kind of person who says a cup of instant is indistinguishable from a freshly ground brew (and post covid there probably are many more people who can't).
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 $3000 isn't worth the price.
>That's nonsense unless your the kind of person who says a cup of instant is indistinguishable from a freshly ground brew
No, it isn't nonsense. And yes, I can tell the difference between a cup of instant and a cup of freshly ground brew.
This video actually proves my point. James not only avoids tasting the coffees blind, but you can see that at 6:35 the particle volume is all basically the same size with extremely minute differences - looks like a factor of less than 10% volume density with very little distribution difference between grinders.
It matters if you’re brewing pour-over coffee. If you don’t use a burr grinder the fines settle towards the bottom while pouring and clogs it up. Takes forever!
The difference in filter and espresso is quite a lot at the blender to burr grinder stage and a little bit from 200-1000$ getting better throughout. I’m sure you’ll be saying you can’t tell the difference in lots of areas because you can’t tell the difference. Which is fine btw!
You can absolutely taste the difference between a crappy grinder and a good grinder. I'm not sure what a carbon fiber grinder is, but a proper flat burr grinder that produces a relatively uniform grind size makes the biggest difference in coffee taste, as long as the coffee you're drinking hasn't been burned to ash.
Comparing my cheap spice chopper and my cheap burr grinder, I noticed a clear improvement. Maybe that's because the spice chopper was so bad at chopping coffee beans. I doubt the fancy burr grinders make much difference, but then again I was skeptical of the cheap burr grinder until I tried it.
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.