Dialing in Brew Espresso
When testing the Encore ESP Professional for brew strategies, after all I had to determine place to begin for my grind settings. And yeah, there’s a whole lot of chatter on-line about this. Reddit, Discord, early YouTube opinions… the same old suspects. Everybody appears to have a special quantity. Some are up within the 50s for a V60 brew, others hanging out within the low 40s. Typical early-days chaos.
Baratza truly gave me some stable data on precisely how the grind adjustment works outdoors of the espresso vary. Based mostly on their steerage, I began at 47.5 for pour over. Utilizing an Ethiopian from Social Espresso that was hitting on all cylinders as my morning cuppa, I hit the anticipated particle vary, round 750 microns, however there have been a whole lot of fines in my grind pattern testing.
To be frank, that is the place the Etzinger M2 burrs begin to present their design age. I’ve been fortunate to make use of higher conical designs these days, just like the Lagom Mini with its Moonshine burrs, so I may actually see the distinction. When you get coarser, the M2s simply aren’t in the identical league in case you’re chasing cup readability.
The M2s are nonetheless respectable for brew. Higher than a whole lot of what’s on the market. However this burr set was designed over ten years in the past, and burr geometry and engineering philosophy has moved ahead since then. After all, RPMs play a giant half too. The sooner you spin, the extra fines you get with conicals, and I consider the Encore ESP Professional spins sooner than earlier Encore fashions.
Proper now, Moonshine burrs are my gold commonplace, adopted by the 1Zpresso X-Extremely and J-Extremely. These burrs are tuned for readability at low RPMs. M2s? Nonetheless stable for espresso and AeroPress, however by no means nice at Chemex or French press. Early assessments on the ESP Professional verify that.
For example, producing a 750 micron mid level grind for V60, brews would take about 30-45 seconds longer to empty out than with an analogous micron mid level produced by the Lagom Mini and its Moonshine burrs. The spent espresso mattress within the V60 was extra visibly muddy with the Baratza as effectively. Extra to come back about this within the full evaluation. Within the meantime, listed here are some images of the method, and my apologies for the unappealing nature of them.
