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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Whoa, that’s impressive that you hand grind for espresso. That takes a bit of muscle even with a pretty dark roast I’d guess. I mostly use it for pourovers, but even on a coarse grind, some of those lighter roasted African beans can have me working up a sweat. :)

    Oh and a couple of beans always pop out of the top! I’ve been meaning to custom-fit some kind of lid…






  • I’ve been roasting my own lately, in a popcorn popper. It’s cheap, quick, fun, actually decent if I don’t completely mess it up, and occasionally even surprisingly good (as in, “I’d pay $20 for a bag of this”). Because of the size of the popcorn popper, I only roast ~100g at a time, so lots of experimentation with roast times, etc. I definitely go on the lighter side.



  • Ooh, the sock thing looks cool, but I’m in the same boat as you on it! Maybe someday.

    The reason I picked the Coava was, I live in Portland and they’ve been one of my favorite local roasters. They do their in-shop pourovers on those things and I always loved how they came out, so, I splurged one father’s day and got myself one. Of course, I don’t have a zillion-dollar grinder, so mine don’t come out quite as good as theirs…


  • I can sift out about 10% fines with a typical Lido grind. Not inherently a bad thing, but I’m intrigued by the almost-zero-fines of the 1zpresso ZP6. A friend of mine has one, and said he did the same thing – was sifting daily with his other grinder, but decided to stop throwing away 10% of his coffee. :) Don’t get me wrong, the Lido is great and has served me well, and I wouldn’t even get rid of it. It’s just a different thing, going more unimodal.


  • I’m very new to sifting, and that was my very first time sifting for the metal filter. I think you’re right that I’m better off with an immersion method if I’m sifting and using metal. I could do the ol’ inverted AeroPress+metal instead. I think you’re right on about it being underextracted because of the too-fast flow. Although, I’ll say, before I ever messed around with sifting, I got some great cups with the metal cone, and a medium-fine grind. More body than a V60 of course, but probably sacrificing some clarity? Not sure… amateur speaking here. :)



  • I’ve been using the Coava cone off and on for a few years and I like it. Lately I’ve moved back to paper for the most part, as I’m trying to learn “the right way” to do a V60. But this morning I did a metal cone actually… and it didn’t work out well. It was kind of an experiment to see what’d happen if I pre-sifted out the fines (I have a 500 micron sieve). Alas, this led to an extremely fast drawdown. I knew that fines slowed drawdown in paper, but people don’t talk about metal out here very much, hence the experiment.

    I’m not sure of the micron size of the Coava…


  • I’ve been back on a roasting kick, using a popcorn popper. It works surprisingly well, it’s cheap, and another fun thing to nerd out to! This week I’m brewing a few different roasts (all in the light-to-medium range) of an Ethiopia Sidamo bean from Sweet Maria’s (my main source for green beans). I usually do V60, but sometimes Kalita, lately using Lance Hedrick’s 1-2-1 recipe. I have a LIDO 2 hand grinder that I’m pretty happy with. I’m toying with the idea of sifting out fines, but I’m not sure I want to throw that big of a variable into my process just yet–differences between roasts and slight changes I make to pouring etc. are enough variables so far. And yes, very satisfied! This 1-2-1 recipe has allowed me to grind coarser than usual (I think because of how you agitate the fines out of the bed and into the filter, which slows the drawdown), and that has really helped with flavors. (Another reason I’m not sure I want to sift out fines just yet.)