mycuppa wrote:
Lwowiak - my advice is to not get sucked into the hype.... ...Conicals serve a purpose in a cafe implementation as they may have superior throughput or consistency under heavy loads due to the inherent design differences over planar burr - which is what a cafe environment is all about and remarkably different to a home situation preparing 1, 2 or 3 coffees at a time.... ...Grind retention afflicts everything, even the mythios to a lesser extent, unless they have vertically mounted burr sets or people take to the DIY improvements.... ...I believe you can make fantastic coffees on every type of commercial grinders, including the M4D which I regard as a small commercial grinder. If you used a Kony E previously........then to me that is the benchmark grinder, so there is no material improvement or enhancement you can achieve......I have a few Kony E's myself and think they are great, but I also love the grind and cup from a large flat burr........
Excellent post (the quote) and if I may add just a little more. The ONLY reason....read ONLY...reason for using large conical burr grinders (in the range being discussed which is commercial / cafe range) is for the followIng. Large volume throughput. NO OTHER REASON: And it has become much more prevalent since the uptake of cafes using naked filters and therefore only getting one coffee out of each pour (because it cant be effectively split). Cafes that were using say for example 25 kilos a week, are suddenly using 50. That kind of turnover with the requisite finer grind settings required to get the particular result, through a FLAT plate grinders, causes overheating and the grinder stops in use, paralysing the business. \ Everyone doing that style of espresso is therefore up taking and changing over to LARGE conical grinders, because they keep on keeping on well after flats have overheated and stopped. Some of the available large burr conicals are NOT handling it and still overheat and stop, leaving only a small number of brand / models that can hack the pace in regard to the design spec. (for my money, only 3 perhaps 4). The fact that there may be small differences in the flavour profiles of same coffee ground through FLAT VS CONICAL grinders in side by side testing is totally irrelevant to the design spec, and will vary anyways due to the other equipment used, the technique of the operator, the capability of the individual palate, and indeed the "care factor" of any particular individual. Grind retention - grind pretension....the grinders are designed for continuous heavy duty cafe use not home use, so whatever will be will be 😉 The rest is horse dung I am afraid, sent spinning round and round the world wide web by equipment-o-philes....which of course results in a lot more conical grinders going out into the market place to cafes that don't need them because they don't use enough coffee. This is nothing more than the "show" of coffee...cafe owners think that by showing off particular types and brands of equipment, that A) the coffee in the cup will be better and B) that the equipment on show will result in more legs walking through the door. Both reasons are in the main, duds. The M4D is a capital small commercial grinder, but if you want to see what the difference on the palate means to you as an individual by all means go for it. Just take care to always run properly configured side by side testing rather than rely on your memory of what you think your old model grinder did in comparison to any new one, keeping in mind the excellent points on that made by Jeff above. Note of course, that if you detect a difference, you then need to decide what that means. Does it mean one is "better" than the other....or just.....that there is a difference 😉 Apologies for being right off topic. I cant make any suggestions because in terms of the design spec and intended use of these models, I don't believe in the relevance of their grind retention whatever that is for different models, so any suggestions I might make in terms of models, wont take that into consideration, and would only be mentioned in terms of their suitability in the cafe environment where a grinder must not overheat and stop. Hope that helps.
