Baratza Encore ESP Professional Grinder

Dialing in Brew Espresso

When testing the Encore ESP Professional for brew strategies, after all I had to determine a superb start line for my grind settings. And yeah, there’s quite a lot of chatter on-line about this. Reddit, Discord, early YouTube evaluations… the standard suspects. Everybody appears to have a unique quantity. Some are up within the 50s for a V60 brew, others hanging out within the low 40s. Typical early-days chaos.

Baratza really gave me some strong data on precisely how the grind adjustment works exterior of the espresso vary. Based mostly on their steerage, I began at 47.5 for pour over. Utilizing an Ethiopian from Social Espresso that was hitting on all cylinders as my morning cuppa, I hit the anticipated particle vary, round 750 microns, however there have been quite a lot of fines in my grind pattern testing.

To be frank, that is the place the Etzinger M2 burrs begin to present their design age. I’ve been fortunate to make use of higher conical designs recently, just like the Lagom Mini with its Moonshine burrs, so I may actually see the distinction. When you get coarser, the M2s simply aren’t in the identical league for those who’re chasing cup readability.

The M2s are nonetheless respectable for brew. Higher than quite a lot of what’s on the market. However this burr set was designed over ten years in the past, and burr geometry and engineering philosophy has moved ahead since then. In fact, RPMs play an enormous half too. The quicker you spin, the extra fines you get with conicals, and I consider the Encore ESP Professional spins quicker than earlier Encore fashions.

Proper now, Moonshine burrs are my gold customary, adopted by the 1Zpresso X-Extremely and J-Extremely. These burrs are tuned for readability at low RPMs. M2s? Nonetheless strong for espresso and AeroPress, however by no means nice at Chemex or French press. Early checks on the ESP Professional verify that.

For example, producing a 750 micron mid level grind for V60, brews would take about 30-45 seconds longer to empty out than with the same micron mid level produced by the Lagom Mini and its Moonshine burrs. The spent espresso mattress within the V60 was extra visibly muddy with the Baratza as nicely. Extra to come back about this within the full assessment. Within the meantime, listed below are some photographs of the method, and my apologies for the unappealing nature of them.