Regrinding Coffee - A Surprising Result

Huge thanks for making a video about this James! I honestly think it's rather interesting and shines more light on how burrs work. I'm fairly sure this is obvious to some people (burr designers are probably saying duh!), but for most it's going to be an eye opener. The whole bean-by-bean feeding came about when I realised how single-dosing causes a coarsening grind profile ie. you get more fines at the start and the as the burr chamber empties, the grind goes coarser. Trying to minimise this I played around with weights stuck on top of beans, but that made it worse (way finer grind at the start and same coarse grind at the end). So I went the other way and figured out super slow feeding means you always end up with the "coarse" portion of the ground dose. Bean-by-bean feeding is of course taking this idea to the extreme. As for regrinding, I find it produces a much cleaner cup on a 71mm conic when using a V60 / pour over methods. Less silt, less muddy notes, just overall better. Augers are the way to go imho, gravity feeding and single dosing isn't perfect imho. Btw the "disk" on the Niche is "inspired" by the above ideas. As for stacked burrs, look at Versalab, they had this idea absolute ages ago, with a cut down conical to pre-crush and a flat burr for proper grinding, all this to avoid gravity and emptying burr chambers affecting grind quality. Last but not least, as I said on Twitter, huuuge props for proper surname pronunciation!

Making coffee used to be so simple. Then I found your channel.

Tried this with a hand grinder. Still grinding.

My wife when she sees me grinding already ground coffee: "you did watch a video of that britisch guy again, did you..?!"

I got a Nescafe ad before a James video. The AUDACITY.

I could see this opening up the doors to multiple stage grinders.

I did this! I set up my beans in a funnel with a little arduino gadget blocking the opening to regulate the "bean flow rate" for a really consistent drop time (extra I know) and overall I noticed a super super consistent grind more so than just filling the hopper and tested this with 3 different coffee I get from Trade. I was able to use nearly a 2 stop finer setting without choking and my crema and flavor was so much Richer across the board! Really interesting concept.

I just tried this with filter coffee, and it was interesting but probably not worth the effort. My grinder is a Baratza Encore, and i used a plastic v60 with unbleached tabless filters. I did 20 grams of coffee to 330 grams of water using Hoffmann's ultimate technique (45 second bloom). Before doing this, I thoroughly cleaned the burr chamber and the chute that leads to the grounds bin. I had to put 20.5 grams in to get 20 grams out of a totally clean grinder for this. I usually grind on 13 for this coffee, and for this I ground on 11. My coffee was a medium roast Colombian. Grinding was PAINFUL. In the Encore, beans spin around between the burrs for a second before actually grinding, so it took 5-10 minutes (not sure exactly) to grind 20 grams. Upon a cursory visual inspection, the grounds looked about the same as usual, maybe a bit finer and with fewer fines, but it's hard to say. i brewed as normal, and the coffee drew down in about 3:20, as opposed to the usual 3:23 with this coffee. As far as taste goes, it was a little bit sweeter than usual, but that wasn't the main thing that I found interesting. The tasting notes on the bag are green apple, mandarin orange, and toffee. I find those to be pretty accurate, so they are what I will use to describe this coffee. Usually when I brew, the most prominent note is green apple, but with this new technique, the mandarin orange note became far more prominent, and the green apple sank into the background. The toffee note was also more prominent. It was also less bitter than usual. The bitterness wasn't a problem previously - it was the good kind of bitter, and was not too prominent - but this was nonetheless quite interesting. I'm tempted to try this again, but I've already had too much coffee and I need to be productive now. I hope this was interesting. Thanks for making this video, James. Super interesting.

For god's sake man, I'm trying to SHORTEN my espresso prep time.

I made a comment as I sat down to watch the video that Jame was doing the work so we don't have to. I've finished watching and it ends up, I was wrong. We've been given homework! Time to grind...slowly.

EK43: I can grind 20g/s James: No

When I worked on a brewery I used to run my grain through the mill twice. The first time the rollers were set so they would just crack the grain. The second pass the rollers were a set a touch finer than normal. I ended up with little bits of malt with less flour than in a single pass. By doing this I got a higher extract effiency and faster lauter.

I really appreciate how transparent you are, how you admit and make up for any mistakes, and respect conflict of interest issues etc. Not enough youtubers do this, and it really speaks to your high level of ethics.

I've been curious about this topic ever since Kruve released their sifters. I mean, what else to do with the boulders? But luckily I live in a world where James can do the tests so I don't have to. Keep up the good work!

Changing the amount of coffee that goes through the burrs affects the load of the burr, its speed, and therefore the ratio between cutting,shearing and compression forces,resulting in different grind profile. A higher load produces a "finer" grind, with more fine particles, while a lower load leads to a coarser and more uniform grind (it obviously depends on how you measure uniformity. Controlling the feeding rate of coffee mass is one way to manipulate particle size distribution. multi stage grinding also has a similar effect and its based on a similar principle. Splitting the load of the grinding process into multiple progressive stages produces a more uniform grind,with lower temperatures and higher output. multi stage roller mills used in coffee industry have this kind of features, with controlled feed rate, 2 or plus stages of grinding, adjustable rolls speed, various rolls teeth profiles,densifying stage etc. allowing for a complete control of particle size distribution.

2 years too late but I tried slowly grinding my coffee beans in my hand grinder, I didn't add the beans slowly I just ground a lot slower, and I'm genuinely blown away by the results. An amazing cup of coffee! Everything else was the same. Same grind setting, same beans, same ratio, same brew method, same timing.

Been drinking Square Mile Los Ancestros all week. Between the coffee and your fun and light videos quarantine is that much more bearable.

i would like to see one niche grind coarsely directly into another niche grinding finely , double instantaneous grinding.

hey james, I would like to know if you would be intrested to make a video on how you clean your equipement. Maybe talk about the effect of different cleaning methodshave on your extraction. I do believe that most people (me included) do not maintain our tools well enough.

Hoffman big brain: What if we could combat regrinding... by regrinding?