Thanks! I suspect the ZP6 and some Ode variant will be on our shopping list (along with the K7).

What do ya know, the ZP6 goes on sale tomorrow. We’ll go ahead and order it then.

Very much appreciated! This place is great. Back in the day when PERC was a 1-person operation and I'd just had my first cup of "whoa!" coffee, Philip would take the time to nerd out with me for like an hour every week and loan me a brewer to play with, and we'd talk all about it. From the very first days of PERC, making time to just share coffee experiences with people and take steps with them along their coffee journey has always been the thing we're most excited about.

I'd love to know! I have a few ideas about how we might tackle some less-common grinders and burrs once we get some new tools in house.

You can blame me (Alan) for that change. The idea was to use one immersion brewer, one pour over brewer, and one espresso machine as representative examples of how the coffees brew in each type of brewer.

Do you reference the website or email brew tips? If the website, has the more recent addition of "slightly coarser" or "much finer" in the V60 and espresso grind size block been as useful as the prior graphics corresponding to the same?

Got it!

Oh, great insight! Alyssa has it to do more testing with it now. I'll ask her and respond here.

Our K6 burrs touch at -4

Burr lock might be beyond zero. You should stop clicking when the arm doesn’t fall by itself.

Please share how those settings work out for you!

Hmm. I wonder how closely different KU units are calibrated.

Looking back through my notes, I did try the KU finer, but tended to get a less even extraction. In that 7.4 range, I tended to get brew times and extractions very close to our dial-ins and solid cups. I will add these dial-ins for the KU and the baseline with our ZM use third wave water. If you're using softer water than that, you may need to go finer.

If you have the chance to brew with these settings, I'd love to hear how it goes for you!

Oh awesome! We actually bought one of those as well. I brewed with it less and feel much less confident in the dial-ins with the S3. I tended to stay within a very small range with that grinder with what we'd call a 450 grind translating to 4.9 on the S3 and what we'd call a 500 translating to 5.0.

Again, that's based on pretty limited usage. Alyssa will do a much better job of really dialing it in!

I've been really shocked by the cups the K6 produces. It tends to pull out certain types of acidity in a really unique way (that I very much enjoy). I'm curious, how do the cups from the lagom mini compare to the cups from the K6?

Thank you for asking the question!! Coffee presents such a unique challenge in that, unlike with a bottle of wine, the end-consumer plays a big part in what the final product tastes like. Short of showing up in someone's kitchen in the morning and brewing and tasting with them, it's really really hard to guide people to the cup they want (and deserve!) without wasting valuable coffee. Every time someone critiques our attempts to do so helps us get a little bit better at it. I sincerely appreciate it.

Yes, absolutely. We've had and sold and advocated for versions of the Baratza Encore for well over a decade now, and I've always wanted to publish brew tips for it. The struggle is how inconsistently they're calibrated from one unit to the next. If something like the OXO pops up repeatedly in our grinder survey, we'll look to add that!

You never grind finer than a 7?!

I brewed a whole lot of coffee and took a whole lot of notes! These are just the settings where the cup I got from brewing with the K6 most closely matched what we got from dialing-in the coffee on the ZM.

We will take some particle size distribution readings soon and see how close the grind sizes actually are!

Hm, maybe you need to be signed up to receive emails from them? If there is a specific coffee you’re interested in, I can check if I have the email for it

Bingo

Yeah. Providing a calculator or reference alongside can potentially help make it much more helpful even if one doesn't directly answer what the particular micron he or she is referring to. Meanwhile, one of the complaint people have is that those converters are not always accurate. I remember seeing more than one complaints here about the Onyx converter on certain grinders, so are other similar converters.

Particle size is a silly one to give because how are we supposed to measure it? Also no grinder is so uniform that every single particle is the same size, it's usually distributed over a range of sizes

I'm sure Perc provides some kind of reference somewhere and are probably referring to the burr gap used in the particular grinder they are referring to, which is also not very helpful unless you have the same grinder.

Even if you had the same grinder, you cannot use one size burr gap or particle size for every single bean, even two bags of the same coffee from different batches will have variation so doing the manual work to dial in each bean is absolutely necessary if you want good results according to your taste preferences.

Yea I use that guide as a general starting point for when someone’s recipe says a specific size. I found personally I tend to prefer smaller grind size on my P2 for most recipes than that guide says. I have no idea if it’s just taste or the chart is ‘wrong’ but regardless it’s still useful for general idea.

That's a great resource, and for many grinders can get you to a good starting place. If you take a look at the Mazzer ZM (which is what we use to dial-in and for service on bar), you'll notice the numbers at the top and the bottom of the chart are the same.

I think they have done alot of testing to measure the actual particle size distribution for each grinder at every setting, and then taking the average of that and using it to create the graphs

They are somewhat useful as a starting ballpark reference when using a new grinder or new brew method but whenever I've tried to actually use it with recipes like this I've had suboptimal results, usually leading to grinding finer that what is required.