I have a grinder update/story, since you all had followed along on my journey to convince the wife to let me buy a burr grinder:
I got it about a month ago, which was the same time I got these Ethiopian Sidamo beans from Theta Ridge. Great - I get to try some new beans in my new grinder. So I put the grinder together and the first time I used it was on these Ethiopian beans.
Now, I had never used a burr grinder before and didn't know what to expect. The grind I got with the Encore was...not what I thought it would be. Some of the resulting beans were long rather than rounded grinds; I hadn't seen this before. I tried the coffee, the coffee was really spicy. Nothing special. I tried a few roasts and go to a point where I thought it tasted good, but not something I would order again. Not bad for $4/lb though, really. Weird thing was though, every time I removed the plastic piece where the grinds dispense into, I'd get a bunch of grinds all over the place. Even if I bumped the grinder I'd end up with a mess. Pretty frustrating.
This past weekend I decided to calibrate my Encore, since I had read they usually need to be calibrated just to be sure it's doing it's thing. Seattle Coffee Gear has a great 8:00 video of how to calibrate it, and I quickly found out my grinder wasn't quite where it should have been so I adjusted it - took about 15 mins start to finish (fortunately I did this before drinking a bunch of coffee, because there are tiny screws to hold in that grinder!).
With a freshly calibrated grinder, I had to try it out to see what the resulting beans were. I had ground some before calibrating so I could compare them after calibrating. Side-by-side, there was a very visual difference between the two. The post-calibrated grinds were much finer and were clumping. The pre-calibrated grind wasn't nearly as fine.
So I made a couple cups of the Ethiopian coffee again, and it tasted completely different. Gone were the long pieces of resulting grinds I was getting, and now I was seeing consistent grind shape and size. The coffee tasted much better.
Interestingly, the grinder isn't shedding grinds like it had before whenever it was bumped or just sitting there. It's working completely as I would have expected.
Long story short: I'm glad I calibrated that sucker sooner than later and didn't waste too much coffee in it. It's kind of a shame they aren't managing to put the screw in the right place when they assemble the grinder, especially when paying $130 for it, but it's easy enough to fix. Just something that shouldn't require fixing.
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