# Flat vs Conical grinders for brewed



## the_partisan (Feb 29, 2016)

What are your thoughts about flat vs conical grinders for brewed coffee? They produce quite difference particle shapes, explained here:





 (with a heavy Italian accent..) There is also vertically mounted flat burrs, such as EK43.

I have compared small conical hand and electric grinders (Wilfa, Feldgrind, Kinu) to a horizontal flat burr (Vario w/ steel burrs) and the grinds look quite different visually.

At same TDS, the grinds from the Vario look coarser, and like flakes, compared to the Kinu which look more like table sugar. In the cup, I seem to get clearer tasting notes with the Vario compared to the Kinu, but both are enjoyable. I would love to make a comparison with EK43 as well, but don't have the budget or space for one.

I would be curious to hear if anyone else has done any comparison between flat and conical burrs.


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## Mrboots2u (May 10, 2013)

small flat burr grinder powered by hand for brewed can't think of any , so in the value range that's about all you can get for a hand grinder, until of course you start getting to the electric ones. I have had an Ek and a MBK grinder , both are good , the Ek was a tad sweeter and had a little more clarity but it was £100's more expensive. I also used a Tanzania for a short while , which make knock out brewed too .

I now have a Vario and bang for buck its a great grinder with steel burrs . In the end you are comparing apples and stairs really when looking at those small hand grinders and things like the bulk grinders. Not many people will use a large conical for brewed ( at home or in a commercial environment ) as it's a bitch to dial back and forth and they tend to retain too much to swap brew methods . You will get opinion on what a graph looks like and how it " should " effect a cup and taste but in the end people can get sucked into buying what they think is the next best thing to get to coffee nirvana .

Most decent cafe's will have some good bulk grinder somewhere churning out drinks but in the end tasty brews for pour over can be as much a function of pour rate and technique so again its hard Looking at particles and graphs is all good but it's how it impacts the cup for you ( and the relative worth to get there ) .


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## Mrboots2u (May 10, 2013)

You can look at grinds and relative tds , but i am not sure what it's telling you as TDS is just one variable in that equation when calculating EY and same EY's can taste different sometimes . It's not telling you the whole story of what happened to the coffee.


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## MWJB (Feb 28, 2012)

The EK-43 doesn't really seem to adhere to 'normal' for conical, or flat burrs, in some respects it seems closer to/between flat burr & roller mill.

From what I can gather, flat burrs have a tighter distribution...let's say 2/3 of the ground weight will fall between 2 sieves, one sieve twice the size of the other. This is in line with SCAA & ECBC standards for drip brewers and goes back to the US department of commerce classifications of ground coffee as analysed by EE Lockhart. If your average size is 840um, then a third should fall outside of 600um &/or 1190um (may not be a symmetrical split, typically biased towards the smaller end, more so the finer you grind).

From sieving my own conical burr grinds, it looks to me more like 2/3 of the ground weight falls between 2 sieves nearer to a factor of 3 apart. So, if your average size is 840um, around a third would fall outside 500um &/or 1450um.

If I was making a big batch brew, I'd want the flats with a tighter distribution. For smaller brews the conicals seem to work well enough (produce tasty brews at least, within 18-22% range), but for a given method you will have proportionally more undersize particles (muddying up the brew, especially an immersion, more so if unfiltered) and maybe more oversized particles (limiting how much you can extract before becoming bittering).


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## the_partisan (Feb 29, 2016)

Mrboots2u said:


> You can look at grinds and relative tds , but i am not sure what it's telling you as TDS is just one variable in that equation when calculating EY and same EY's can taste different sometimes . It's not telling you the whole story of what happened to the coffee.


Yes, EY is the main metric, but I used TDS interchangeably there since all of the other params are same (dose, brew water, beverage weight), and I don't really bother calculating EY each time. Sometimes there are minor differences in beverage weight (+-2g, mostly due to evaporation I imagine), but my method is consistent enough that I can hit the same TDS to 0.01 in 3 consecutive brews with same grind size.


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