many of you will not agree with me, but that’s ok
if you are relatively new to the espresso game you will hear people talk sagely about the importance of single dosing
well ive been down the route for the last few years and my personal view is that it does more harm than good for most people
the exception to the rule is if you dont drink much coffee
i.e. if you are only making a couple of shots a day, then fine, single dosing is appropriate
but if your consumption is higher than that, or there are multiple users, eg a family situation/home office/office then i think single dosing is complete nonsense
why?
people will say ooh, i am such a stickler for freshness id only ever single dose. in my experience this is complete bollocks. as long as you get through the coffee within 7 days of opening the bag and putting it in the hopper you will have all the freshness youll ever want. its a valid concern if your consumption is such that you cant get through it in 7 days or so
so everyone knows & crows about freshness and seems to embark on single dosing as the default setting
in my view there is a more significant issue; grinding beans without weight on them. i.e. single dosing allows the beans to bounce up and down – it happens even in the HG1, the evidence being ‘chunk’ grinds coming through, which are easily spotted down below. chunk grinds are grinds that are an irregular shape, clearly different from all the others
exponents of single dosing will say, ah, but i place a tamper on top!
i say, ah, but it doesnt work, because once the tamper is resting in the top of the boss on the grinder there is no weight on the beans for the last bit of the grind
the way i think of a grinder is this; it is a milling, like a milling machine you might use for wood working. in wood work you always take great care to ensure the piece of wood you are milling is secure by some means. if not it quickly becomes dangerous as the mill burrs connecting with a piece of wood quickly sees the wood being hurled at great speed across the workshop
much the same thing happens with coffee. if the bean is not held securely against the burr it is hurled away (pop-corning), but we dont worry as the mass is much less than a block of wood being hurled across the room. but as with the milling machine and the wood, a big ugly irregular gouge is torn from the bean under these conditions. the result is a coffee grinds that are irregular in shape, clearly different from the shape and size of the grinds produced by that burr when the coffee bean is held against the milling face
i have a stage 2 unpopular view which i am less certain of, but i think it is possible that grinders with good dosers do a better job of distributing the coffee grinds (by which a mean an even distribution of the small, medium, large grinds thoughtout the puck) than doserless grinder do. for this reason you see L1 owners like Kfir saying things you mightnt expect like, hey, i prefer the K10WBC to the K10f. and that is i think the explanation
the trouble is of course that dosers do trap stale coffee, to a greater of lesser extent and so do need to be regularly cleaned out. there is also something incredibly appealing to me at least of an accurate electronic dosing mechanism that dumps in the same amount of coffee each time – the K10f does a very good job on this front – i would say +/-0.5g which i can live with for the convenience it brings
anyway, for my money, assuming you get through a bit of coffee forget single dosing. i think it will improve the quality of your grind enormously. take your big bag of fresh gourmet roasted coffee, cut the top off, and pour it all into the hopper and enjoy that lovely rattling sound of the beans dropping into the hopper. stick the lid on the hopper and get on with your life. it shouldn’t take half a day to make an espresso – if you have a routine that is hassle free you are much more likely to enjoy yourself
a word of warning – do not have your grinder located in direct sunlight. sunlight landing directly on the beans in the hopper will completely stuff them at a highly accelerated rate!!! possibly less than 30 minutes if the curvature in the hopper is have a magnifying effect on the sun’s rays hitting the beans
with that caveat disclosed, get on and load up that hopper with beans & start enjoying your espresso rountine that little bit more by simplfying it!