Dialing in Brew Coffee
When testing the Encore ESP Pro for brew methods, of course I had to figure out a good starting point for my grind settings. And yeah, there’s a lot of chatter online about this. Reddit, Discord, early YouTube reviews… the usual suspects. Everyone seems to have a different number. Some are up in the 50s for a V60 brew, others hanging out in the low 40s. Typical early-days chaos.
Baratza actually gave me some solid info on exactly how the grind adjustment works outside of the espresso range. Based on their guidance, I started at 47.5 for pour over. Using an Ethiopian from Social Coffee that was hitting on all cylinders as my morning cuppa, I hit the expected particle range, around 750 microns, but there were a lot of fines in my grind sample testing.
To be frank, this is where the Etzinger M2 burrs start to show their design age. I’ve been lucky to use better conical designs lately, like the Lagom Mini with its Moonshine burrs, so I could really see the difference. Once you get coarser, the M2s just aren’t in the same league if you’re chasing cup clarity.
The M2s are still decent for brew. Better than a lot of what’s out there. But this burr set was designed over ten years ago, and burr geometry and engineering philosophy has moved forward since then. Of course, RPMs play a big part too. The faster you spin, the more fines you get with conicals, and I believe the Encore ESP Pro spins faster than previous Encore models.
Right now, Moonshine burrs are my gold standard, followed by the 1Zpresso X-Ultra and J-Ultra. Those burrs are tuned for clarity at low RPMs. M2s? Still solid for espresso and AeroPress, but never great at Chemex or French press. Early tests on the ESP Pro confirm that.
For instance, producing a 750 micron mid point grind for V60, brews would take about 30-45 seconds longer to drain out than with a similar micron mid point produced by the Lagom Mini and its Moonshine burrs. The spent coffee bed in the V60 was more visibly muddy with the Baratza as well. More to come about this in the full review. In the meantime, here are some photos of the process, and my apologies for the unappealing nature of them.
