Some more impressions.
The indirect grind control is indeed very nice. With Compak, you had to hold it with both hands to rotate. Here, you can do it with two fingers.
It is extremely precise once dialed. All my shots come out at exactly 35s.
That is, until you change the beans. And to be fair, I changed the beans 3 times, and everything was fine. But the beans from Back to Black just stopped the grinder dead, I had to remove them completely and start again.
I wanted a grind-by-weight coffee grinder since I bought my first coffee grinder, Compak K3 some 7 years ago. At the time, there was only Baratza Sette 270Wi. Strangely, seven years later, there aren’t many choices either: either same 270Wi or Eureka Mignon Libra. There are mixed opinions regarding Baratza’s connical burrs design and it’s ability to grind for espresso. So, I decided to give Eureka a chance.
First few impressions:
Tiny. With the hopper, it is as tall as K3 without one, and much shorter. The feel if very compact.
Sharp edges. Compak is all round. The machine is round cone, the hopper is a round “hat”. Eureka is all angles, so sharp I almost cut myself getting it out of the box.
Smooth and clean. Eureka is known for making very quiet coffee grinders. While not very important for me, it is noticeably quieter. What was far more important for me, and one of the reasons I finally decided to get a new grinder, is the clumps and distribution. In the meantime, the coffee is clumpless, and comes out as in the videos, in an even stream. That also means that despite me not getting my funnel yet, it doesn’t leave as much mess as Compak does.
Now, I still haven’t dialed the grind, simply because I didn’t want to waste coffee. So maybe it will get clumps once I grind finer. We’ll see soon enough.
A couple of weeks ago we replaced our rather simple Russel Hobbs filter machine with a more sophisticated Sage Precision Brewer.
And boy, does it make a difference.
It doesn’t just pour boiling water, as some other brewers do. It controls water temperature using PID, like the higher-end espresso machines. The quality of coffee I get is comparable to filter coffee from Black Sheep. And it’s also easier to clean.
Potentially, it doesn’t even require paper filters. There’s a plastic basket that comes with it as well. But I got a stock of those paper filters during COVID, so I’m not sure if it’s worth to test the basket.
The downsides are that it’s huge. The tank is 1.7L, and it’s 1.7L of coffee. While we drink around 0.5L in the morning. So the pitcher always feels almost empty. I wish they had a smaller model for such cases.
For the past few months I stopped using any kind of thermometer when frothing the milk for my coffee, and started using “the hand method”. In my opinion, milk heathed to 60C is already hard to work with. So I keep it around 50C, or until the jug is hot to the hands touch.
I’ve been a fan of Ethiopian coffee for a long time now. But for the past few months, since April, we’ve been drinking a lot of Chinese coffee. It’s available only from one coffee roastery, Origin, as far as I know. But it’s absolutely fantastic.
Coffee that I won’t ever buy again, I think, is Union Coffee Roasters. Bought 1kg of Sumatra beans that turned out to be dark roast. Couldn’t finish them.