Need a little guidance on grinding - eviltoast

Morning Gentlepeople.

As a coffee newbie I am having some small issues while trying to improve my game. I have a Oracle Touch and subscrube to a local monthly coffee delivery, so my beans change weekly.

My issue is that the grind setting is incredibly different from bean to bean. With my last bag, grind 14 gave a perfect 1:2,5 ratio. With a different bean today, I had to discard two cups before learning that grind size 3 gave me the same ratio. 14 gave me 1:3,5 which tasted rubbish.

The problem is that I got channeling and very little crema.

I guess the questions are: do different beans require completely different ratios or am I doing something very wrong?
Should I accept a very high ratio to avoid channeling on certain beans?
Or should my timer be lower on certain beans?

Thanks in advance for any help and have a great cup this morning!

  • Bronzie@sh.itjust.worksOP
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    4 months ago

    Ok I just did a quick weight test and the difference is massive!

    The store bought beans are marked 6/7 darkness and gave me close to 60 ml of volume.
    The subscription without marking gave me <50 ml for the same weight. That’s allmost a 20 % difference in weight even though they look very similar!

    I’ll do another test with an exact number of beans to confirm, but I’ve learned a lot already. Maybe my 1:3,5 ratio wasn’t half bad after all and what to actually expect from such a light roast.

    This is cool stuff! Much obliged again!

    • evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Counting beans isn’t particularly helpful, either, cause they come in a range of sizes. A pacamara bean, for example, is huge, while peaberries of any variety will be tiny. Coffee mills generally sort beans to consistent sizes so they roast well, but you could get coffee from the same farm from 2 different roasters, and each roaster could be buying different sized beans.