Daily grind

Grind, steep, filter ... regardless of extraction technique, all three steps are necessary.

my interest in grinders might have peaked when i bought an old KitchenAid grinder to discover how well it worked. it was quite primitive and fell short of Hobart's usual standard. i have also owned grinders made by Braun, Bunn, Geska, and Gaggia, have used others, e.g. Zassenhaus, and read countless reviews. they can be useless.

Grind

in my opinion, Mazzer's Super Jolly is the gold standard. it isn't their best, and i doubt that Mazzer is the best grinder manufacturer. on the other hand, gold isn't the most precious metal. the Super Jolly's burrs are larger than the ones most people use for paper-filtered coffee, and its motor is powerful enough to turn them without hesitation. Yes, Virginia, size matters :-)

it's generally acknowledged that burr performance depends on grind size so one might assume that the Super Jolly isn't suitable for paper-filtered coffee, but empirical results dominate theories. in this context, the grinder's primary issue is its interface. otherwise, it works quite well.

my Super Jolly lives in its box, because i have so little counter space and think manual grinding is more appropriate when making single servings. until recently, i used a lightly modified Orphan Espresso Lido 2. it was a good value and i still like some aspects of its design, but its interface is also inconvenient.

static electricity complicates transferring ground coffee from the grinder, and ground coffee is inherently unruly. this morning, i used a cheap Tre Spade box mill. ground coffee falls onto the sides of its drawer/receptacle, so neat transfer is impossible. (one of the projects in my backlog is replacing this drawer with a plug, possibly made by truncating the drawer.) fortunately, there's an elegant solution.

remove the drawer and put the mill on a piece of paper(board). grind as usual, dump the ground coffee on the paper, and rap the mill to clean it before transferring the coffee to the filter. the ground coffee that remains in the mill can be blown/sucked out, or ignored.

Steep

if i had to guess, one variable that deserves more attention is bean density. (do people measure/report density when evaluating burr performance?) based on very casual observations, i suspect that dense beans benefit from a steeping technique that moves water through the ground coffee. thus, steeping in a (paper) filter might have an advantage over other techniques, but using the filter, its holder, and/or grind size to control steeping time ... this technique is so primitive, any advantage it might have must be minimal.

one variable that hasn't been overlooked is the number of holes at the bottom of a Melitta-style holder, because flow rate affects steeping time. i prefer three, because i place my holder on top of a drinking glass so i can see when coffee begins to drip through the filter. a three-hole filter holder reveals when the grounds were badly pre-infused.

before pouring continuously, ideal pre-infusion instantly saturates the ground coffee before liquid begins to flow through the filter. (saturation should be immediate to minimize heat loss.) the next drop of water causes coffee to drip through all three holes simultaneously. needless to say, these things never happen, whereas asymmetric dripping is common.

[January 24, 2026 — dripping through the center hole of my filter holder is quite uncommon. when i try to get the first drop to fall through the center, it's not unusual for coffee to drip through one/both of the other holes first. after coffee drips through all three holes, it stops dripping through the center long before filtering is complete.]

pulse pouring might be more forgiving or demanding, and the perceived advantage of one-hole filter holders might outweigh having more visual feedback. i own so much coffee equipment, buying another holder is not an option.

long ago, to compare coffees more fairly (?) i used a cheap Braun machine to heat and pour water. the machine behaves consistently, but changes are needed. i removed its filter holder to make room for a handblown Chemex flask on the hotplate. there is no risk of cracking, because these flasks are virtually indestructible.

Chemex filters were a bit large for those trials, so i used Melitta filters. a metal spiral plate salvaged from a broken Bodum maintained the filter's shape and distributed the hot water. the filter's seam does not burst if it's folded correctly.

comparing coffees should entail optimizing various variables (e.g. water temperature) so that exercise was pointless, but using this assemblage of parts was fun. i thought another configuration might solve my pre-infusion problem. unfortunately, the first attempt was not encouraging. i let the machine dry and put it back in its box.

Filter

in this faux science vein, i once evaluated paper filters by using an AeroPress as a test platform. i assume someone else has done this by now, because it's easy to cut paper discs. the result is unlikely to be meaningful, but it's not useless.

based on the coffee i was drinking at the time, i concluded that Melitta sells the best paper. it's the only perforated paper (and not similar to Frau Bentz's invention), so i eventually performed another experiment.

i perforate generic filters with a cheap Wartenberg wheel, which you can see in my photo. i don't make as many holes as Melitta does and generic paper is thicker, so the result isn't the same but the effect of perforation is obvious.

in real life, the sharp end of the tool rests on the bottom of my filter dispenser, but you needed to see the pins. when new, they are too sharp; it's easy to reshape them.

not surprisingly, inferior coffee should be filtered through paper that is not perforated, because we want less flavor. this fact annulled my preference for Melitta filters. now i try several types of filters whenever i change beans.