Single Dosing or Hopper Doser dosing?

Unknown

So what do you all think. Single dosing or using a doser and a hopper, or just a doser w/single dose?

Inquiring minds want to know :cheer:

Dan Streight

In the grand scheme of things blowing several grams of beans/day via retention shouldn't get me riled; but it does.

So for now I'm using my Pharos as my only shot grinder. I do get some chafe build-up in the bean hopper...but easy enough to extricate with 90psi of air a few times/week.

Albeit its a small, small market but I believe there is still room for a well thought out electric grinder built with acceptable tolerances...that can deliver consistently great grind sessions with near zero retention.

For now...the Pharos keeps me from complaining...too much

Stephen Jenner

Stephen Sweeney post=2360 wrote: So what do you all think. Single dosing or using a doser and a hopper, or just a doser w/single dose?

Inquiring minds want to know :cheer:

Happy with my HG-One, despite the "boulders", I am not sure that I am capable of telling the difference at this level.

However, if I were to justify replacement, I was impressed with Kfir's theory regarding K10 PB...

http://londiniumespresso.com/forum/londinium-i-owners-forum/120-londinium-tamper-best-4-me-with-tapered-basket/page-3#.Ut67_Xk4k18

Unknown

Stephen, you are thinking the doser does the WDT to even out the lumps in the basket? I would think so.

My HG-1 gets less clumps than the Mazzer Kony-E but since I have reconciled myself to WDT and only pull a few shots a day it does not matter much.

If I were to use a grinder in any sort of scenario like many shots in succession I would get the doser and live with the mess.

My single dose efforts are pretty close to mess-less...

Stephen Jenner

Yes Stephen, I don't make too much mess either...

As for my son, that is a different matter, there is often a little pile of grinds sitting on the base of the HG, and some grinds have obviously stuck to the burrs with static, so that by the time I get there, there is a half gram in the blind doser...

I don't know how he does it, but he breaks all the rules and shrugs his shoulders, and informs me that as long as it is "warm and wet" it sets him up for the daily commute.

:ohmy:

Unknown

Sounds like your son need a Kerig in his room....

Stephen Jenner

More likely he needs to be gone!

The trouble is that London is a very expensive place to live and houses/apartments are not exactly cheap.

Unknown

Maybe a VW Bus with a stove for a Moka Pot?? Our granddaughter is 22 yrs. of age and still trying to figure out how to pay for herself. Very different than when I was growing up, and I was even living in an expensive resort community!

Good luck!!!

Unknown

Stephen Jenner post=2367 wrote: Yes Stephen, I don't make too much mess either...

As for my son, that is a different matter, there is often a little pile of grinds sitting on the base of the HG, and some grinds have obviously stuck to the burrs with static, so that by the time I get there, there is a half gram in the blind doser...

I don't know how he does it, but he breaks all the rules and shrugs his shoulders, and informs me that as long as it is "warm and wet" it sets him up for the daily commute.

:ohmy:

Do you use RDT on the beans? I do and it really makes a positive difference.

Stephen Jenner

Yes Stephen, I have a little pump atomiser.

I do WDT in the blind cup too.

It's my son that makes the mess!

Unknown

Maybe a cattle prod for your son would be advantageous? :-)

Stephen Jenner

Stephen Sweeney post=2377 wrote: Maybe a cattle prod for your son would be advantageous? :-)

I think my wife has a master plan to pay him to leave....

Watch this space....

Unknown

Are you sure it was "Her Plan" or his???

Children are more devious and smart than the average parent thinks! Our son is a Correctional Officer in a maximum security prison (for the last 23 yrs) and he is always amazed at how devious the inmates can be!! I never would have though he had the dedication to stick with a job like that and neither did my uncle think he could, and my uncle was a 30 yr career Air Force Security Officer.

I hope you child grows into manhood soon, for your sake!

Stephen Jenner

How long do I have to wait for him to grow up Stephen?

He's 32 at the moment!

He has stood for Parliament twice, was until a few weeks back the local party constituency chairman, and has just been selected to stand as a councillor in the upcoming local election... Our recently retired police commander has retired from his seat and is pushing him amongst all his friends... They aren't even in the same party!

What is really going on, is that my wife is an old softy... Irish women and their sons, a formidable combination.

Unknown

A working Barista intervention is needed...

They could teach him the art of single dosing and what it is like to work.

Unknown

Does anyone else have anything to add about their experiences with single dosing as compared to hopper dosing and its variants?

Frans Goddijn

I use the HG One which is single dosing of course, and I invested money to have special parts built to make the Mazzer mini hopperless and the Mahkönig Vario too, so even though I guess a hopper can be great in dedicated hands, I have a tendency to not go there because it would mean the previous investments were a loss ;-)

My girl friend and her daughter have finally begun using the Rocket for their coffee, albeit using the Bella Barista capsules and ordering these quantities is a bit expensive so I might place the hopper back on the Vario to lure them to using that one instead for the grinds. No way would they weigh off single dosesof beans of course or use any kind of droplet or stirring technique. There a hopper and a doser would maybe help a lot.

Reiss Gunson

i could be talking complete balls, but now that i have a bit more time i am starting to investigate this

i have had a Mazzer Robur electronic, which is the industry standard if you want a bomb proof grinder (but I'm less convinced about the grind quality) and a dose weight that has a wide distribution about the mean (i.e. poor), and now a Compak K10 fresh that is well made but not to the degree that the Robur is, in my experience it doses with a variance of +/-0.6g which i can live with

but of late i can't help wondering if a doser, curse that it is for trapping stale coffee and all that, doesnt do a better job of evenly distribution the grinds of all the various shapes and sizes that come out of any given grinder

so while it won't be news to many of you, there is a conundrum

the robur gets a fail mark in my opinion as the variance in the dose is too wide
but it is a tough ask
think about this for a minute, you want a high through put grinder but you want a doserless mechanism on that grinder to dose with the smallest variance possible
when a big grinder is delivering 16g of ground coffee for espresso use in 3.5s you have about 4.6g of ground coffee leaving the grinder every second, or 0.46g every tenth of a second
so you can see it is very challenging to design a high output grinder that doses accurately
against that backdrop i think the Compak K10 fresh is either best in class, or very close to it
i prefer the K10 burr set to the Robur - for reasons i can not explain the Robur burrs dish out a big 'chunk' grind every now and then - easily visible to the naked eye

so far so good as far as the K10 fresh goes
as you know we drink enough coffee with 2 people around most days to make running a dower full of coffee work
as Kfir has already mentioned the K10 fresh dose not like being run dry on beans - don't do it!
instead tip in the next bag of coffee before the beans get to the bottom of the hopper and just seamlessly move from one bean to another, adjusting the grind as the new bean comes on stream

but here's the thing. in my experience i can't help thinking that the doser vane mechanism does a better job of mixing up all the different shapes and sized of grounds so they are evenly distributed throughout the puck

so if i were a cafe and really getting through the beans and had good baristas that could dose consistently with a dosered grinder I'm pretty sure i would save myself a pile of cash and run K10 conicals, or if i was feeling lavish the WBC edition of that same grinder

i was talking with Kfir earlier this week and when time permits he hopes to post a video of his espresso routine which will be in the must watch category as Kfir consistently delivers nice shots

but I'm ashamed to admit that I'm not a take the hopper lid off and scrap all the ground coffee out of exit chute every time a do a grind. kfir is, and i suspect a lot of you are.

how i am getting great results with the K10 fresh is to take great care to dump the coffee cone in precisely dead centre on the portafilter basket

then its a quick nutate with the tamper, finish off with a lever press, and its done

i will put up a video of this in the next week i hope

so as you can see, the perfect grinder hasn't been invented, everything is a compromise

i hope lots of people pile into this thread - no one is going to jump down your throat

for my money achieving a great distribution is the most overlooked part of making espresso

you can take objective measurements with weighing and timing, but whether your distribution was any good is a visual assessment and it can be difficult to know exactly what you did wrong and how to correct it

Gino Magnotta

Completely agree it is all a compromise. I got tired of single dosing and so went for the hopper approach to life, using pretty much as Reiss outlines. This has served me well, although the last couple of weeks I am finding that I am chewing through the coffee at a rate of knots on my K10 Fresh. Bean changes impact both the dosing output and/or the appropriateness of the grind. By the time you have detected this you have to burn off two shots for the adjustment to take effect. And then some if you believe that the grinder needs to be running to make fineness changes. I have even noticed this between different bags of the same bean roasted at the same time. My results have been variable as a result. It didn't appear to be like this before.

I am going to give the shute of the Fresh a good clean as I am beginning to suspect it may have something to do with gunk build up behind the shute flap. If this keeps up I may to reconsider single dosage again, god forbid.

Reiss Gunson

A nice example to illustrate the point is this;

While a mazzer mini electronic is a vastly inferior grinder to the robur electronic, obviously enough, the variance in the dose delivered by the mini electronic is far far less than the robur electronic

Why? Simple; the coffee is coming out of the mini E far far slower than the robur E

And that's the simple physics of the matter - we all want a faster grind delivery, but it is at odds with also wanting a consistent from an electronic/Doserless grinder; they are simply in conflict with each other, there is no easy answer to the problem

Unknown

There is another approach to hopper dosing. Use a hopper that has no air circulation in it, like a cylinder with a stopper pushing down on the beans. Small amounts of coffee can be used that way.

Kfir

Eventually you are going to see that single dosing is the best compromise.

Doserless grinders that works well for home are the smaller ones like the Mazzer mini E, Compak K3 touch, Vario etc. but when going to large commercial grade grinders in order to achieve consistency you need to keep the exact same conditions i.e adjust the grinder to a certain amount of coffee in the hopper and to a specific bean and keep those parameters at all times.
If the coffee will drop to a lower level the grind output will change and then adjustments and a lot of coffee to dump.

I have been in that path moving from single dosing (K10 PB) to the K10 Fresh and I just could not accept this variance especially since I am roasting my own coffee and always has 2-3 types of roasted beans to choose from.
So after a few months I sold my Fresh and moved back to the K10 PB and couldn't be happier.

Sure it's a compromise but it's a small price to pay...

Kfir.

Unknown

Kfir! You are right! Searching for the best grinder for a certain situation/bean is indeed frustrating because as you said the beans age and cuse the grinder setting to need to be changed. I decided to go with 3 or 4 grinders. One for Caf one for de-caf and a third one for testing my latest roast if one or the other of the first two did not do it without resetting either of them.

The Mazzer Kony with "Hopper" for small amounts of beans for a party situation.




My other powered grinder, which is currently being tuned by Terrasnova.









And the HG-One that works the same way every time.





And finally a grinder for testing roasts while the other roasts are getting old and causing me to change grinder settings. The Pharos.

Kfir

Very nice Stephen! that is the best of all worlds I guess...
If I only had more counter space I'll probably would adopt another 1-2 grinders as well.

Maybe I will add another one some day but for now the K10 PB is a good solution for almost all of my requirements except for serving a lot of cups in a row...

If I am going to add something to my counter in the future for that it will probably be the Ceado E37S:

http://www.ceado.com/en/product/21.html

I have used one briefly and really liked it, retention figures seems lower than the big conicals, it grinds ultra fast and very quiet as well.
So for a doserless grinder for home with a small 600g hopper this is a good option.

Kfir.

Unknown

Yes, space in the kitchen-"The final frontier".... I am not sleeping on the couch or in the garage, yet, so I guess my wife is pretty tolerant :-)

The K10 PB is a good compromise indeed. I suspect the E37s would be a good addition. I owned an E37 when they first came out and possibly they had smaller burrs than the "S" series. I returned it because of the totally crappy electronics(on 2 of them!!!)!! In retrospect I should have kept it and just put a momentary push button switch on it and then had a great grinder! Quiet, fits under an upper cabinet and easy to dismantle and clean. Ceado was thinking, they just did not have a good electronics interface. Grounds would get up under the circuit board and my experience with NASA taught me that static and integrated circuits do not mix! If you buy one get that circuit board protected in some way. Maybe they did it already, that I do not know. A Mazzer Mini Hopper fit the E37.

Keep us Posted!

Reiss Gunson

Stephen Sweeney post=2485 wrote: There is another approach to hopper dosing. Use a hopper that has no air circulation in it, like a cylinder with a stopper pushing down on the beans. Small amounts of coffee can be used that way.

would you mind elaborating on this stephen? I'm not sure i fully understand, but i am interested.

Unknown

Reiss:

The Mazzer Kony that I showed in the picture has it without beans in it. The clear, solid acrylic rod has weight to it and that weight is constant. It also has a fairly tight seal at the bean end of the rod, so much of a seal as to get a pumping action when lifted and pushed down. So, it simulates a certain amount of beans above the grinding chamber. That clear tube hold about 1/4 pound of beans.

The 30g of grounds in the chute and chamber seal the tube from the bottom.

Here is a video of the plunger not in the tube. It shows 2 sizes for 2 different sized tubes.

Gino Magnotta

Good discussion this and it has got me considering single dosing again. Cleaning the K10 Shute did help to regain some consistency, particularly nudging the inner Shute flap.

Perhaps a partial solution is to weigh and adjust every shot the K10 dispenses out so that you at least regain control over that parameter.