Morning Gentlepeople.
As a coffee newbie I am having some small issues while trying to improve my game. I have a Oracle Touch and subscrube to a local monthly coffee delivery, so my beans change weekly.
My issue is that the grind setting is incredibly different from bean to bean. With my last bag, grind 14 gave a perfect 1:2,5 ratio. With a different bean today, I had to discard two cups before learning that grind size 3 gave me the same ratio. 14 gave me 1:3,5 which tasted rubbish.
The problem is that I got channeling and very little crema.
I guess the questions are: do different beans require completely different ratios or am I doing something very wrong?
Should I accept a very high ratio to avoid channeling on certain beans?
Or should my timer be lower on certain beans?
Thanks in advance for any help and have a great cup this morning!
Yes, very normal. As you gain experience, you’ll get better at making an educated guess where a best initial grind setting for a new bean might be, off of things like source, density and oiliness. This will eventually cut down on waste, but takes practice to arrive at.
The short answer is that there are a lot of variables, so your process has to be dialed in per bean, which is why most people end up just sticking with 1 type of beans.
Different roast levels are going to have different densities. Different bean varieties (and localities) are going to have different density and size. The age of the bean comes into play as well.
Some variables affect the actual brewing, others affect how the beans grind. Every once in a while, i’ll have a bean that just seems to make more fines for whatever reason. I guess it’s just down to the stiffness of the bean and the size.
If you want to be able to switch beans at will, you’ll need to keep notes for each variety, and adjust back and forth as needed.
I don’t think you’ll be able to get a new bean right on your first shot no matter how you try to adjust. If you adjust for one variable, there’s still all the others.
It’s starting to dawn on me that you might be right.
I think I’ll keep trying different beans to test a lot of different coffee before landing on one variety and order that instead.
I’ve gotten a lot of really good advice here today that I’ll use in my future brewing career.
Thanks for taking the time, mate!
If you’re gonna do that you can also try cupping beans first to get a sense of what they taste like before properly extracting them. I roast as well and this always helps get like the essence of the bean/roast profile’s taste down so I know how I want to extract.
Just reading through the comments I can’t tell if you’re buying from a local roaster or not but you should do that if not. You can also chat with them about recipes for the beans to know extraction ratios, dosage amounts, etc. I used to have the Oracle touch and ended up buying some simple 3d printed items that turned it into a single dose grinder and allowed me to tamp manually. Might be something you wanna look at. Ironically I found the Oracle although more expensive and makes very good coffee doesn’t make great coffee because of all the automation. Even compared to less expensive Brevilles. I can try to find links to what I purchased or to the actual plans on case you print yourself if you’d like.
Yes the are local. I like supporting locally and ethically sourced as much as possible.
I’ve been reading about people modifying them on forums and briefly considered adjusting, but decided against it. I was only «allowed» this machine because of the nice and easy to use UI. The missus doesn’t share my enthusiasm for playing with minutiae details, so I have to stick with pre weighing beans before grinding and fiddling with my own settings. She wants a full hopper and a button called Americano.
Thanks for the advice and you taking the time though mate!
Out of curiosity; what machine did you end up with?
It might help to know a little more about the actual beans. Depending on the roast those ratios might indeed vary greatly, I’d think.
These are quite dark. Other than that, I know very little about them.
I’d go crazy and say similar roast to the supermarket beans I get great results with at 14 grind, if that is of any use?Cheers!
The darker the roast, the lighter a bean should be. You could count a number of beans you have your numbers right and get decent results with, weigh them, and thus compare their roast to that of other beans. That way you‘d be able to find out if your achieved ratios are tied to the roast. Maybe you could even work out a scale telling you what to expect, a ballpark to get your ratio somewhat right when opening a new bag of beans.
That said, I’m only citing theory here, don’t take what I say as the last word on anything :)
Ok I just did a quick weight test and the difference is massive!
The store bought beans are marked 6/7 darkness and gave me close to 60 ml of volume.
The subscription without marking gave me <50 ml for the same weight. That’s allmost a 20 % difference in weight even though they look very similar!I’ll do another test with an exact number of beans to confirm, but I’ve learned a lot already. Maybe my 1:3,5 ratio wasn’t half bad after all and what to actually expect from such a light roast.
This is cool stuff! Much obliged again!
Counting beans isn’t particularly helpful, either, cause they come in a range of sizes. A pacamara bean, for example, is huge, while peaberries of any variety will be tiny. Coffee mills generally sort beans to consistent sizes so they roast well, but you could get coffee from the same farm from 2 different roasters, and each roaster could be buying different sized beans.
Appreciate you taking the time!
I’ll do some volume/weight tests and see what the difference is. If it’s lighter than I thought, a higher ratio is what I should be going for anyways.
Cheers mate!
Damn meanwhile I’m here just grinding every beans on the same setting, barely even wondering why the volume sometimes changes dramatically (also getting different varieties all the time). This thread opened my eyes, but I’m probably still never gonna change the grinder settings lmao.
In all honesty, I think that happiness comes from finding a bean you love and sticking with it. Experimentation has its place, but…
James Hoffman has a great video (or even series I believe) on “dialing in” espresso machines, definitely worth watching.
That’s also my key criticism with buying subscription coffee, often they send quantities that are too small to get to a meaningful brewing routine. I’ve had a gifted subscription for 150g monthly, and I was going through 30-40g just perfecting the output. So by that time I was left with enough coffee for 2 weeks and had to resort to alternative sources.
Grind settings are widely different for each bean, it’s normal. Depends on a lot of factors (origin, variety, altitude, roast etc).
Lighter roasts tend to need slightly longer ratios (~1:2.5 to ~1:3.5), darker roasts shorter ratios (~1:2). Faster shots (20-25s) are usually fine.
As for channeling issues, puck prep is of paramount importance but I’m not sure how much prep you can introduce in this machine’s workflow. Counterintuitively, channeling is often caused by grinding too fine, but the water rushing in the channels actually make the shot much faster. If you can WDT between grinding and tamping, it would solve a lot of issues.
Thanks for the feedback.
Sadly the tamping is integrated in this machine so I have no say in it really. No way to disable it and do manual only, so only more would be possible after the machine is done.
My shot time now is 28 seconds static, just to have a baseline and adjust grind to match weight afterwards. All are medium to dark roasts. This is following James Hoffman’s review of the machine.
Apart from the channel, the coffee tasted good. I am mostly concerned with constantly fidling with the grind to achieve a consistent result.
What would you have tried in my case?
Decrease shot time with coarser grind and ignore the lack of crema?Cheers!
constantly fidling with the grind
…is a necessary step on the way to great tasting coffee. You just have to decide if it’s worth the effort for you. Those kind of super-auto machines are better suited to slightly darker roasts and just getting the same consistent beans every time.
Yeah I ended up returning it and picked up a Profitech Pro 600 and DF64 G2. It’s a different world to be honest
