Training the grinder

hshortt

Work on our Kitchen is nearly complete so I broke out the grinder on Saturday and wound the control to fine and very quickly managed to feckerise the damn thing. It stopped working and ended up back at BTs to be corrected by the lovely Wallis.

I collected it yesterday, tail between my legs as I had apparantly wound the control to ultra ultra fine and locked the blades. The lovely Wallis was able to correct it though and I was back in business as of last night.

Taking it slowly now, two very nice espressos this morning, but it's being dispensed too quickly. So I'm making only iddy biddy adjustments to the control for a finer grind while aiming for the 20-25 second espresso.

My question is, how fine is too fine?

Thanks and cheerio
Howard

Gran Hermano

Sounds like any excuse to meet up with Wallis

With my MC2 if I look at the grinder without any beans in the hopper
the burrs are almost touching.

Too fine is when either the burrs are touching (which sounds like what
happened to you over the weekend) or when the coffee takes too long
to percolate from the portafilter or clogs it completely. Keep the baby
powder fine grind for turkish coffee as it's too fine for espresso.

It's time to get out the stopwatch and start with a too coarse grind,
which again sounds like you have at the moment, and to gradually
make the grind finer until you are hitting the 20-25 second shot time.
This will gave you your 'base' setting with the approximate grind for your
machine and you should just need to fine tweak it with a slight adjustment
to allow for bean roast, bean age or humidity.

hshortt

Gran Hermano wrote:

Sounds like any excuse to meet up with Wallis

Did I mention that she's particularly lovely?

I'm in with your tips and I'll be brewing up again when I get home. Still more work being done in the Kitchen so no clips till it's finished.

cheerio
Howard