Thread: How are your coffee beans lately? Mine are AWFUL!

Originally Posted by woodPixel

With the pot, perhaps boil it in a big pot with some sort of cleaning solution, like BiCarb or a coffee-machine cleaning sauce/powder? Dissolve all the crap off it and get it nice and fresh again?

WP, this was the best idea you've had in your life! I have previously reported how it freshened up the pot and got the foul flavour out of it.

It seems I may have to do this more than monthly, as this morning I though the flavour wasn't quite "there" so I boiled the pot up again in Bicarb. Sho'nuff it fixed it. So I got to thinking about the old pot.....

Jaysus, you should have seen the crud that came out of it! The 10 litres of water it was boiled in was the colour of weak tea, and with significant carbon sediment. Much of it was in the pipe the goes up through the top part, where the coffee liquor is pushed up. And this was after thoroughly washing, compressed air, high pressure water up the cloaca, more washing, left in a cupboard for months so it dried out and dropped its enormous carbon load (about 1½ teaspoons!), then more water pressure and washing.

Here is another thing.... I was given 15 boxes of ten Nascafe coffee pods, all different types, for Xmas last year.

That day I pulled the little machine out of the cupboard and upon firing it up for the first time in years, it emitted ALL of its magic blue smoke

So.... the pods were put into the cupboard and forgotten....


Today wifey-poo was clearing out some accumulated accoutrement and came upon them. Asked why I couldn't slice the foil cap off and use these in the Breville espresso machine..... GENIUS!!!

Opened 10 pods, dumped them into a container and proceeded to make 4 outstanding espressos over the day.... amazing!

Originally Posted by FenceFurniture

WP, this was the best idea you've had in your life! I have previously reported how it freshened up the pot and got the foul flavour out of it.

Boiling a pot in another pot and removing foul flavours from things is my forte.

A rare chime-in..when i carried a vacuum bottle while in the field, hunting, I cleaned them with TSP.
An hours soak, and good as new. Both stainless, and an old glass one. YMMV

Originally Posted by woodPixel

FYI - just bought 3 lots of the four-bag samplers (250g x 4) from Sicilia Coffee | Freshly Roasted | Buy Online | Delivery Aus Wide

My two lots of 4 samples arrived yesterday arvo. Have tried two so far (Organic and Crema Ultimo) and they are both very good and quite different to each other. I suspect that the two blended together would be a very satisfactory mix as the Crema would add a little punch to the Organic.

I started with the Organic as I expected it to be ordinary at best, but was very pleasantly surprised. All of the organic coffee I've had to date has been particularly ordinary and flavourless (especially Macro brand). There doesn't seem to be the necessity to have flavour, just an "organic" label (for suckers?).

Originally Posted by FenceFurniture

There doesn't seem to be the necessity [for organic coffee] to have flavour, just an "organic" label (for suckers?).

I believe the technical term is the "halo effect"

chuck an "organic" label on the sweepings from the floor and the resulting crud must be "better for you"

How are you coffee beans now? Mine are still GREAT!

I boil up the Mocha pots in a weak bicarb solution every 2-3 weeks to clean them up, but the biggest improvement was the coffee itself from siciliacoffee.com.au. Formata de Famiglia for me and at $58 for 3kg inc post, it's very reasonable, and 5kg even better at $89.


It seems that I prefer my coffee to be brewed for at least 4-6 hours and settled, rather than freshly boiled. I guess it's a bit like a curry - the flavour improves with a little age. So the routine now is to brew the night before, put it in a bottle for the fridge after a little room cooling. The results I'm getting are very very consistent....and yummy. The acidic front recedes and the warm flavours are developed.

I have to say that I can't detect much difference in freshly ground as opposed to grinding a whole batch and packing it down into two containers to squeeze out the air. If I do a whole kilo it lasts for about 10 days and is very consistent for the period.

My Aldi coffee grinder has become a slow PITA. It's only 10 months old, but for the last 2 months it only grinds half the qty in the same time time. Blew it out with CA in case of a blockage, checked the internals - all seems ok. Nearest I can tell is that it is having a bean feed issue. Anyway, they are going to refund my $100, so now I have to find another grinder. I was actually very happy with the Stirling (Aldi brand) with the small exception of the static electricity it imparted onto the grind (made things very messy).

So, bearing in mind that I want to grind batches of ½-1kg at a time, does anyone have a grinder to recommend? Maybe the Aldi one might come back on this March, and I'd be willing to risk it again - there's a 3 year warranty on them. However, a grinder with more steel parts (rather than plastic) might be less inclined to impart the static electricity (it's all good until I take the lid off to scoop out the coffee and then it flies around like crazy - humid weather seems to help though).

Im no expert, but I worked for a time with an old codger who was. Man was he picky about grinding.

He swore that something called a "conical burr" was the only way to get a good grind.

This may be meaningless, but it is the sum total of my knowledge!!!

LMK, I wouldn't mind one too. The side one on the Breville BES860 is OK.... but perhaps could be better?

A conical burr is the way to go. They yield more oil (and thus crema) than blade grinders do. The Aldi jobbie is a conical burr. The mechanism is simply one grooved (burred) male inside a burred female, and to adjust the grind they are simply moving further apart (coarse) or closer together (fine) by winding the mechanism.

The Beratza Encore is looking good for my use. The Breville has (I think) too many bells and whistles for the price to be properly reliable. I just don't need all that stuff, and it's more stuff to go wrong. I use one grind setting (finest) so a 200 micron grind sounds pretty good. Nor do I care about a dosage setting - ½kg at a time thanks. There's a vid at the bottom of that link, and when it finishes there's a better vid will show up by James Bailey.

I've got a Melitta conical, but iron, not ceramic. Bought it...8 or 9 years ago. Still grinding away, one or two times a day.

I've had my conical burr Mazza Mini since 2004 and I replaced the hardened sintered steel burrs in 2018.
I was having problems with flow consistency (same beans same tamp pressure etc) so I asked a coffee nerd friend (who spent a few years as machine field tech) about this and he suggested it could be worn burrs and asked me how much coffee had been ground by my grinder. When I told him it would be close to 500kg of coffee ihe recommended my grinder burrs should be replaced
The replacement burrs cost $100.

Because my machine turned out to also have water flow problems around the same time (which I had to fix) it was hard to say how much improvement the new burrs made made. I don't really care - it works great now.

The grinder nerds are currently into burr alignment which apparent causes a wider distribution of grind sizes. The SOP is to correct this with thin paper shims but my coffee nerd friend is looking at getting me to turn up some Al spacers/shims deal with this - a bit beyond me I have to say.

My other (decaf) grinder is an Iberital Challenger - Spanish made also has conical burrs. Quite a good grinder for the price.
That has ground about 200kg of coffee - still seems to be working just fine.

After 16 years my Lelit combination machine started to play dead. I needed a grinder and coffee machine to replace it.

The grinder I chose is

Eureka Specialita | White | $869 | Free Shipping | Best Price | Italian Coffee Grinders | Melbourne

So far it has been brilliant, and I mean brilliant.

I coupled it with a Lelit Mara X coffee machine, I'm now in coffee heaven.

Mick.

Originally Posted by Optimark

Eureka Specialita | White | $869 | Free Shipping | Best Price | Italian Coffee Grinders | Melbourne

I (cough), should bloody well hope so!