So, you’ve maxed out the finest grind setting on your coffee grinder, but your shots are still pulling short. What can you do?
We experienced this for the first time a few months ago with our Ceado E37J grinder. Our roaster informed us that our espresso blend required light tamping. But we couldn’t achieve the perfect extraction without tamping hard and filling the basket more than usual. We couldn’t grind any finer because we were already on our Ceado E37J’s finest setting.
At first, we thought the only solution was purchasing a new grinder, but we weren’t ready to drop a thousand (or a few) on a replacement. We called in some advice and were told our burrs were probably dull. It hadn’t occurred to us that the blades inside our espresso grinder could get dull just like a knife or a pair of scissors. Inside a coffee grinder are burrs. The size of your grinder’s burrs and how many pounds of coffee you grind each day impact how often your burrs need to be replaced.
We found a replacement pair of burrs for our grinder online. They cost about 150 dollars. Before installing the new set, we did some research and discovered Ceado grinders have a dial inside the housing that can be adjusted to give a broader range of settings. Which means we could grind finer after adjusting this ring.
While our grinder is fixed now, and we didn’t have to replace our burrs just yet, we did struggle with our grind setting (after making the adjustment demonstrated in the video). Frist, we moved the dial too far and basically, we were grinding too fine causing all the coffee to clump together and not come out of the chute. We played around with our dial placement and eventually got it working exactly how we need it. We’ve saved our replacement set of burrs for when they do eventually get dull.
If you have maxed out your grind setting, and your shots are pulling short… crack the lid on your grinder and find out if there is a way to grind finer or inspect your burrs to see if they are dull and need replacing.
Here’s the link that helped us that discusses grinder range calibration: https://support.wholelattelove.com/hc/en-us/articles/4415080458003
Thanks for reading!