I'm curious how often staylor changes his grinder. Mine hardly ever gets adjusted, and only for beans that are really old, like 2 weeks or more old. I've learned to disregard the shot parameters for how long they can pull, and find a 50sec. ristretto to be a fine thing. So if one day the grinder setting pulls 50sec. and then a week later the beans are at the point where they pull a 40sec. shot, I don't really care... both are more than drinkable, and are perfect in their own right.
Which leads me back to stepped vs. stepless... the hash marks on the K10 represent about 5sec. in shot duration. Who knows if the steps on say, a M4 also equal about 5sec. in shot duration, but my point is why should a difference of 5sec. make or break a shot. I'm talking on the long end of the shot; I can see where there'd be a difference between a 20sec. shot and a 25sec. shot. But for my setup and my tastes, even 25-30sec. is kinda short, especially if were talking full shots and not ristrettos.
That's pretty much where I am at as well. I hardly ever adjust my grinder. I will play with the other variables first (dose, tamp pressure, lever manipulation, or whatever) and they always get me in the range that I want to be in. Of course that's easy to say now, but I have to remind myself that it took years of sweating all of the details in order to get to a point where the details just seem to fall in place auto-magically, a tiny bit of "Espresso Force" (
TM).
I think a case can be made to anyone who is new-ish to espresso (less than 2yrs of focused shots) that it's important to focus on manipulating/playing around with just one variable (grind) while keeping all other variables as close to the same as possible, and study what that one variable does to espresso for a month. Then stabilize that variable and spend a month on the next variable. Half a year into it gives a much better understanding of how each variable impacts and then it's time to start playing one variable off another.
I spent months and months isolating variables, then some more months combining, the some more months trying to break espresso, doing things that shouldn't be done, going well beyond the generally accepted practices just so I could form a vision of the full playing field. Learning the really good, and the really bad, helped me find the better than middle ground. Sometimes I get amazing shots, sometimes I get pretty good shots, occasionally I'll get mediocre to poor shots, but all of them are better than retail shots so I don't have much to complain about. The shots that I pull today come from paying my dues in the espresso trenches in my cafe and more importantly as a focused home roaster/espresso nerd; 100,000 shots later and I can confidently say good espresso isn't easy, so anyone who's doing it effortlessly gets a tip of the hat from me.
Back to grinders... I get good results from my Vario. I'm sure I would get better results from a K10. Anyone want to give me a K10? ;-)
