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My cheap grinder was making my pour-over taste sour, so I started sifting out the fines with a kitchen strainer.
It took the acidity way down and gave me a cleaner cup, even with my $30 grinder. Anyone else use a weird hack like this to fix a gear problem?
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iris_adams3mo ago
That's a clever fix for a common problem. I've been there with a grinder that made more dust than grounds. It's amazing what a little kitchen ingenuity can do when you're not ready to drop money on a new machine. My version of that was using a small paintbrush to sweep stray grounds off my kitchen scale.
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walker.jana2mo ago
Three hundred microns or so is the cutoff for that sifter, right? What mesh size are you running, and have you tried weighing the fines you pull out to see what percentage of your total dose you're actually losing? I used a 400 micron sifter once and it stripped almost 20 percent of a light roast, which threw my extraction way off because the remaining larger particles had way less surface area. Did you dial in a new grind setting to compensate, or are you just letting the brew ratio drift down by that lost weight?
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faith_palmer513mo ago
Honestly, that seems like a lot of extra work for a small fix. You're losing a good amount of coffee mass by sifting out fines, which changes your brew ratio. That could lead to over-extraction in its own way, making the coffee taste bitter instead of sour. You might just be trading one bad taste for another.
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