Let’s start with the obvious answers, “Just weigh the dang beans”, “Just get the single dose hopper”, “Just clean more often”, and my personal favorite, “Just spend more money”.
Now that that’s out of the way…
I’m tired of fiddling with my grinder. I started my espresso journey with a cheap steam unit and a whirly blade grinder. The grinder was quickly replaced with an Encore, and the steam toy was replaced with a second hand Gaggia Classic.
After a few years I realized I hated weighing beans every day, and realized that the steps on the encore were too big to truly get the most of my espresso setup so I bought a Sette 270i.
For about a year it worked admirably. I rarely cleaned it, but it never seemed to falter.
However as the 2nd year passed and now the 3rd year is waning, the grinder is becoming more and more finicky.
I should explain that in my mind, the entire point of buying the Sette over the Vario or any of the other stepless grinders on the market was the time based grinding.
I’ll always remember when I first got it, I got 18g out in 5.85 seconds.
Slowly it crept up to the 6.5-7 second range but I figure that was normal.
But now in the 3rd year it’s taking 10.5 seconds to get approximately 18g out.
Why approximately? Well sometimes it’s 16. Sometimes 20. Other days 17.4. Very rarely do I actually get 18.0 grams out.
There doesn’t seem to be any trend or logic to it, but whenever it starts to drop down to 16 regularly I figure it’s about time to clean it, so I remove the hopper and lower burr and give it a good scrub with the included brush.
The lower burr is never really what you’d call dirty, but it makes me feel like I’ve done something I guess. Plus, that is always the first thing anyone says to do when you say you are having grinder troubles. Gotta clean it out!
I called Baratza support and they recommended using a lighter roast.
As expected, that shortened the time to get approximately 18g out, but the inconsistency didn’t improve, and I was reminded why I don’t really like light roasts for espresso.
What beans am I using? Why not use what I used when I first got the grinder? I am. They are from a local roaster, same beans I’ve been using from the same guy for 8-10 years now. Fresh roasted, I’d call them medium - medium/dark, and $10/lb. No, not $10/12oz bag. Pound. 16 full ounces. And $10 cash. But anyway, the guy is like 80 years old, been roasting coffee in the same building for 60 years or something, I figure he knows what he is doing.
I call back Baratza. They offer to send me a free single dose hopper and recommend I weigh the beans.
No.
Also, what about the inconsistency?
You see, if on one of those days where I only get 16g out, I continue grinding until there is 18g in the portafilter, the espresso machine nearly acts as if I have installed a blank disc. Instead of a shot taking 30ish seconds to pull it may be 50-60 seconds or more. Clearly something else is going on.
Baratza support: “Oh, well when that happens it’s because the coffee is getting stuck in the chute and getting reground until it is much finer than normal, you should clean it more often, here watch this video on how to clean”
Me: ಠ_ಠ
Anyway.
I don’t want to spend $3000 on a Mahlkonig, and I’m just too skeptical about time-based grinding at this point and too cheap to spend $800 just to try out a Eureka Mignon and hope it’s better, so I guess I’ll just keep cleaning my Sette unless anyone has a different suggestion.
And thank you for reading all this.
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Oxo makes a grinder with a scale, which has been working well for me for a few years with no cleaning. l did have to modify it a bit to remove a safety thing and attach a bent wire to the top of the blade to stir the beans to help them feed, since the angle of the bottom of the hopper is too shallow. But it wasn’t very expensive.
I have an Encore and I’d say that it makes a massive difference when I clean it every
6 monthsvery frequently as recommended per the manual. It tends to cause a gigantic difference in grind size and speed, so I’d believe a steady drift. That said, inconsistency is weird – it makes me feel like something is (internally) loose and occasionally shifting. Any chance you’ve got something broken? I’m not familiar with the Sette, but (e.g.) the Encore has a plastic ring for the lower burr that sometimes needs replacement after a few years. Source: I replaced mine after a few years.Yeah the Sette is completely different internally than the Encore. The ring you are talking about is not there, the lower / inner / fixed burr is adjustable up and down by turning a stepped ring with stepless adjuster, the upper / outer burr is the driven one.
I sent pics to Baratza and they said everything looks fine but they would send me a free replacement lower burr if I felt I needed it. I may still go that route, but I doubt it’ll make a huge difference. The bigger thing is the chute from the burr to the portafilter. It seems to clog up and be the main reason for variance in grind output. Instead of the coffee falling out into the portafilter it has to push it’s way out. That’s why light roast beans helped. Less oil, less sticky, less clogs.
Ah, clumping + dark roast (oil) makes a ton of sense. That’s… frustrating. I don’t do dark roasts, so I don’t usually have that issue. My only issue is the deafening sound (which I’m sure you’re also painfully familiar with). For what it’s worth, my Encore is modded to add a stepless grind adjustment in addition to the stepped ring (the Preciso adjuster).
Admittedly, I’ve being weighing and single-dosing so long that it’s second nature, but I find it hard to imagine it’s not less frustrating overall to do that than to deal with what you’ve described. I’m also less familiar with the Sette, but I’ve done a popular flapper mod that keeps the chute clear and my Vario responds well to an RDT/single dose workflow.
One final consideration is that burrs wear and account for some variance, but that’s likely the smaller variable here.
Agree, this feels a bit like yelling at the wind.
This particular grinder clearly isn’t doing time based dosing any longer for a reason that eludes the obvious troubleshooting.
Single dosing is an easy fix, and the most obvious one this side of swapping for another grinder.
I got a Turin SK40 ($200) a few weeks ago to replace an extremely worn out 13-year-old Capresso Infinity
noisy floating chaff generatorgrinder, and it’s a revelation. I looked at the Encore ESP and a Fellow Opus at around the same price range, but I’m really pleased with my choice.Part of what damaged the Infinity was that it would get fines packed under the burr mounts, so they would creep in their shitty plastic mountings if I wasn’t ridiculously fastidious about its annoying cleaning procedure - eventually the parts that were interacting wrong because of that wore down so it kept getting worse. I can’t say that the Infinity’s friction-knob timer ever produced particularly consistent output, but my expectations for $100 weren’t that high on that front.
The SK40 is one of those “I enjoy the ritual” single dosing units and I use a scale, but my observation is that within one bean once you’ve weighed a couple samples of whole beans to set the volume, you could probably switch to a volumetric-in method for single dosing with no major ill effects. Density varies a lot from coffee to coffee (roast, source altitude, etc.), but seems to be fairly consistent within a single product.
It is also clean and quiet compared to its predecessor, and retention is below the detection threshold of my cheap scale.
Folks get snobby about ridiculous expensive grinders with big flat burrs, but hobby stuff is always diminishing returns, and I try to avoid chasing up the exponential part of the price/performance curve. That inflection point for grinders has been moving, everyone was excited about the Niche Zero in 2017, the SK40 is more or less where the Niche Zero was (and still is) for $650, for $200.
Have you cleaned the hopper? The beans you are using are probably oily, and over time, those oils can get sticky and slow your feed time. If you have, then it’s either time for a new grinder, or you will need to start single dosing. Just do it when you get your beans - throw 18g in baggies or something - and it’ll make your life easier.
