It’s been five years since I first got into specialty coffee, and I had just learned that you can have two different coffee grinders of equal calibre but produce drastically different flavour profiles in the cup (while all the other variables stay the same). It’s not a simple matter of grind size consistency as I had always thought.
Specialty coffee is a huge rabbit hole. I knew that there was a ton to learn when I decided to pick up the hobby. Very early on, I learned that having a good grinder is one of the most crucial factors to a great cup of coffee, and I knew that some grinders are specifically made for espresso. I thought, Okay, I will get a very good non-espresso grinder, consider this factor checked and move on to other variables.
I bought 1ZPRESSO’s JX grinder after some research—it was well-reviewed for my budget. Since I just got into specialty coffee at the time, I didn’t want to spend way too much upfront because I knew my palate wasn’t experienced enough to comprehend what “great” coffee meant.
The JX has served me very well. I’ve gotten some great brews with it and it was even able to grind fine enough for me to dabble in espresso-making with the OutIn Mino. The JX is built like a tank and it’s still working well and gives me great brews.
For the last five years, the thought of buying a new grinder didn’t occur to me at all, because I thought I was set with the JX and I mostly focused on trying different brewing methods, improving and experimenting with my brewing techniques and trying out a wide variety of beans and roasters. However, I recently got the itch to upgrade my grinder and I started researching what’s going on in the coffee hand grinder scene. That’s when I discovered that different high-end grinders can produce cups of coffee with very different taste profiles—it’s not a simple binary of “a great cup” or “not a great cup.”
For example, the 1ZPRESSO ZP6 has been hailed as one of “the best” grinders for pour-overs, and it specializes in bringing the highest clarity and flavour separation in pour-over brews. It also results in lighter-bodied brews that are often described as “tea-like.” However, ZP6 is also considered a niche or “single-purpose” grinder because some people don’t want so much clarity and flavour separation in their coffee. For them, they prefer grinders that produce brews that are more balanced where flavours are more cohesive rather than separated. Frankly, I wasn’t sure which group I belonged to because I’d only brewed coffee with one grinder.
I ended up buying the 1ZPRESSO ZP6 because I’ve always enjoyed coffee beans that had pronounced flavours and a lighter body. I also thought it would be good to have a grinder that’s drastically different than my JX so I can pick and choose which grinder to use based on specific beans rather than getting a better version of the JX, thereby rendering the JX obsolete.
I had some beans left from San Pedro Ocopetatillo, Mexico, roasted by Subtext. I wasn’t a huge fan of this bag as I struggled to get a brew I really liked from it, so I thought it would make a perfect experiment to see if grinding with the ZP6 would yield significantly different results.
It sure did, and it was the best brew I had with these beans. It was such a stark difference that it was impossible for it to be placebo effect. One could say it could simply be due to different grind sizes—true, there was no easy way for me to match the grind size exactly between two grinders, but I had tweaked the grind size for these beans with my JX quite a bit as I was trying to dial them in, and I couldn’t get a cup nearly as good as the ZP6. Note that I didn’t even get a chance to tweak ZP6’s grind setting as it was my first brew and still, the cup was already better—that’s impressive.
Obviously, it would be silly to draw conclusions based on the one pour-over I brewed with the ZP6. And that’s why I decided to get some beans from a roaster I haven’t tried before—Escape Coffee from Montréal, Canada. They are frequently mentioned when people talk about specialty roasters in Canada, so I really look forward to brewing their beans (currently de-gassing). I will say I love the design on their packaging labels! The fact that they indicate difficulty level for filter and espresso is pretty awesome.
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