The Coffee Thread

James Hoffman, 2007 Barista World Champion and world reknowned coffee expert:

 

To be fair, he was using a £500 grinder (same as mine) to grind the beans. That made more of a difference to the taste than the machines he used. He probably wouldn't have even ranked any of them 'ok' if he hadn't been using it. As long as you're happy. Just be aware that you won't ever get a 'good' coffee until you spend over £500, so there's no point ever upgrading and spending less than that (unless you go into pourover/french press/aeropress and spend all the money on the grinder/specialty beans). I appreciate you're happy with what you've got.

 

It's a Niche Zero and it's fantastic. It costs £500 but is widely regarded as the best sub-£1500 grinder that you can buy (brand new) though you can occasionally get other brand more expensive ones second hand (e.g. if a coffee shop gets a new grinder and sells off an old one on ebay). If you get into coffee, you'll soon discover that weighing the grinds and the output from the coffee machine is very important, along with the consistency of the grinds' size (you wan't them all the same as much as possible, which takes remarkable feats of engineering to achieve).

The Niche is what they call a 'single dose' grinder i.e. you only put in the amount of beans you need for a single (or double/treble) shot of coffee and it grinds them there and then. It's special because it has almost zero retention (hence the name). It's the one Hoffman used in that video. You put 20g of beans in and you get 20g of grinds out (95%+ of the time and 19.9g out when you don't, so near enough). It took much more expensive grinders to do that before the Niche came along. The other special thing is that it can adjust from espresso size grinds to filter size ones quickly and easily (just turn a dial) and it does all the sizes in between at the same level of consistency. It makes tweaking your dial-in process very easy. Beans change as they age/get more stale so it's important to be able to tweak the size of the grinds for a consistent coffee shot (generally getting finer and finer until they're past their best).

Of course, if you want to just have a whole bag of beans on hand there are plenty of grinders that have hoppers that you can just empty the bag into - but that's a different kettle of fish with different considerations (and you can't do single dosing on those without the grind size being very inconsistent).

If you've got a budget and a type of grinder in mind, let me know and I can make suggestions. Generally speaking, though, you want to spend as much as you can on a grinder - it's really, really important - way more so than the coffee machine. As Hoffman proved, you can get an 'OK' coffee out of a cheap coffee machine with a great grinder, but you'd struggle to get an 'OK' coffee, even out of a £10,000 coffee machine, with a cheap grinder.

 

Were you aiming for a cappucino? The milk foam looks very large (like it has too much air in it).