We’ve switched coffee beans recently as after finishing the last bag of Drip Roaster’s La Papaya, a natural Ecuadorian. Those, and probably most coffees in the last year or so were ground on an electric Niche Zero. But with these new beans and the same grind setting, the brews were stalling on the last draw down, taking a good minute longer than normal.

The scale on the Niche Zero was always inadequate for grinding for pour over filter coffees. The grinder itself, however, is more than capable, except maybe that it’s using conical burrs instead of flat, but I weirdly haven’t reached that level of coffee nerdery just yet. With most beans for the Hario V60, I’m ending up setting it to somewhere between 45 and 50, on a scale that maxes out at 50. Sometimes I end up loosening it more, which is possible on this grinder, however there’s no scale written on the device anymore. The only way to gauge the setting is either the safety button, which ensures that it cannot be turned on while the lid is open, roughly a finger’s width after the 50 setting and a few centimetres further is the an arrow used for calibration. As you can see, it’s hard to reproduce the same grind settings if the only guide is "somewhere along the way between the safety button and the calibration arrow". Or arguably worse, "half a finger’s width before the safety button", whose finger, which finger, does the thumb count as a finger too. Questions over questions. This is not how we brew our coffee, we need to go at least a smidge more scientific than that.

So yesterday I took my trusty, German-engineered, hand grinder out again. For what hand grinders go for, it’s ridiculously priced given the fact that you still have to grind the beans yourself. I sacrificed a few beans to, visually, get into the ballpark of the right grind setting, and tada, hit the perfect timing for finishing the last draw down (2 minutes, 30 seconds) pretty much on the first try. The coffee tasted great as well, no bitterness, light as a tea. Although, since I’ve been getting back into gong fu tea brewing recently, the comparison of filter coffee being more akin to tea really doesn’t hold up, but that’s a story for another day.

What struck me immediately is the feeling you get when grinding the beans with your own hands. Not in a cave-person kind of way, smashing beans between rocks, roaring unintelligible things. At the same time, I don’t want to say the overused-to-meaninglessness term of meditative. But more in line with meditative than smashing beans with your own power. With both of my hands busy drawing circles in the air, cranking away at breaking the beans into uniform, tiny particles, I tend to just stare into the distance. I zone out for the time it takes to grind 15 grams of beans, it can’t be more than a minute. Only to be followed by another, slightly different kind of zoning out as I brew the coffee, this time with more brain synapses firing as I follow the steps of my recipe, pouring given amounts of water in given amounts of time, watching the coffee draw down just enough in between the pours.

It certainly is a good way to start the day again between breakfast and work.

I just looked up when I bought the Niche Zero. It was just at the end of 2020, and it got shipped out from the UK in March 2021, in the middle of the messiness that were the first few months of Brexit. What a time it was, on top of one of the heights of the pandemic. Populism really did the UK residents dirty.

And in a similar vein, I distinctly remember how I bought the Comandante hand grinder. It was during the first COVID lockdown, early 2020, before there were any vaccines available. And in hindsight, before we (Westerners) knew about respirators, back when we went grocery shopping with homemade pieces of cloth covering our noses and mouths, woefully ignorant to the fact that they don’t actually filter virus particles out of the air. I took the bus down to Zehlendorf, the old location of Cabana Roasters, it was empty, and like many coffee shops back in those days, they had a make shift setup right in front of their door, doing all business through the window. What a strange time it has been.