The Impact of Grinder Alignment on Coffee Extraction Efficiency

in #coffee6 months ago (edited)

In this video Patrick talks about being into this new dripper and in particular those papers. He talks about how he's so into the thick filters because they allow him to grind even coarser. When I first watched the video it made no sense to me why he wanted to continue grinding even more coarsely.
I suppose he thinks that there is no such limit to how evenly you can extract a coffee bed and that coarser will always give greater flavor. Even if this is true, it should be kept in mind for the home brewer the trade-off in EY with coarse grounds (i.e. they waste coffee). As well, coarse grind recipes require good grinders. I wonder if there exists a critical point in grind size where your extraction uniformity is "good enough" and beyond it is diminishing returns, if so, you could opt for this optimal grind size and not have to sacrifice so much EY. Seems like Rolf doesn't care too much about sacrificing EY though, since he's still competing in WBrC and isn't interested in compromises. When you are absolutely surrounded in basically infinite coffee it kind of stops mattering how much you’re dosing. I would love to see some experiments focused on diminishing returns of courser grinding.

Jonathan Gagné has quiete the oposite philosophy in grinding coffe conpared to Patrick, we wants to grind as fine as possible without clothing the filter or having undesirable flavours, but he got good cups 'till he hit 25% ext. yield with his EG-One.
I also think better anligned grinders produce very less fines & if the grind is very unomodal too it will speed up the draw down a lot.
So what normally takes you 2:30 lile with a Comandante could take you 1:30 with a well anligned ek43, just as example, idk if that's true in practice.

But I also think a shorter brewing time can lead to a different flavour profile compared to a brew that took longer, but has the same TDS & ext. yield.
The EK 43 is more unimodal, so the extraction level is more even, but also the shorter brew time could lack the extraction of some components we want.
So we could use a higher dose & do a bypass, but I dot see any café doing this..

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