Please note that this article was originally published on Medium by Robert McKeon Aloe on February 3, 2024. For those interested in reading the complete article, you can follow this link: Read the full article on Medium.
The MOMENTEM grinder finally arrived at my door, and I was so excited. This grinder is a rare dual burr coffee grinder, and it is the first dual burr hand grinder. My first tests are to get to the right grind setting for espresso, which turns out to be a little more challenging due to the two burrs until I realized that the top burr could be used to slow feed the bottom burr. Let’s take a look.
Momentem Grinder
The grinder is unique for a few reasons:
- Dual burr
- Chaff collector
- Sieve at the bottom.
Chaff doesn’t taste too good, and this idea is very interesting. There is not as much chaff collected in the espresso use-case, but for pour-over, I suspect the impact is larger.
Two burrs allow for some feed control as the first one can slowly feed the second one.
Grind Size
Previous experience shows slow feeding the beans to a grinder changes the particle distribution and how the shot flows. The effects the full pile of beans on the burrs also changes the particle distribution throughout the grind as the pressure from the bean pile decreases.
In trying to understand how two burrs affects the grind, feed rate was a confounding variable. If the top burr grinds too coarse, everything went to the bottom burr, and the top burr acted like a pre-breaker. If the top burr grinds too fine, then there is a challenge getting some of the finer grinds into the bottom burr.
I used the DiFluid Omni to analyze particles of both burrs, and I started with a few settings for the top. There were some similarities, but some odd shifts when the particles got large. This could have been conflated by the sample size being a few 100 particles.
