I roasted 47 batches before I admitted my $12 grinder was the problem

I keep a little notebook by my setup and flip through it to see what went well, and the numbers finally stared back at me: 47 roasted batches since March, and 31 of them tasted muddy or sour no matter what I did with temp and time. I blamed my beans, then my water, then my pour, and even bought a scale and a gooseneck kettle trying to fix it. A barista at a shop in Sacramento asked to see my grind and pointed out half the grounds were boulders and half were dust, which is what a cheap blade grinder does. I spent $12 on that thing two years ago and never questioned it. Switched to a burr grinder and the same beans I had given up on pulled sweet shots on the second try. If your roasts keep coming out flat, check your grind before you spend money on anything else. What was the dumb thing that held your coffee back for way too long?

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hayden70926d ago

47 batches is a crazy amount of patience, but here's the thing nobody talks about: your grinder wasn't just making bad grounds, it was making your notebook useless. Think about it. You logged all those temps and times and pours, but every batch had a different mix of dust and boulders, so none of your notes actually matched each other. It's like trying to find a pattern in dice rolls where the dice change shape every throw. Once I got a burr grinder, my old brew log went from random noise to something I could actually read, cause the only thing changing between batches was me. So yeah, fix the grind first, but also go back and redo a couple of those 31 bad batches, you might be surprised how much of your old data starts making sense.

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