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Permalink Reply by Jay Caragay on July 22, 2008 at 10:31pm

Buy a scale and weigh the beans before brewing.

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Permalink Reply by Joseph on July 23, 2008 at 5:07am

If you get a portion control grinder , you are only able to have one type of coffee in the hopper at a time. It grinds a measured amount of coffee,which you can adjust for your situation. A dual portion control is OK if you only plan on ever offering, say, one regular and one decaf.Most coffee houses prefer the opportunity to offer more coffee options including possibly different styles of brewing special coffees.For this -as Jay said- get a scale and a bulk grinder.Ditting or Mahlkonig(sp?) are some possible choices for quality and consistency.I bought a refurbished Mahlkonig directly from them and it is a beautiful workhorse.

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Permalink Reply by Alex Galt on July 23, 2008 at 7:28am

We pre-weigh our coffee beans with a digital scale, put them in filters, and store four of them at a time in air tight containers (we brew four different coffees at a time), and then grind seconds before brewing. We use a Grindmaster 800 series that belongs to our roaster. It seems to me that portion control grinders limit your options too much. Plus having the continuous grinder allows us to grind retail coffee for customers (or at least those that don't have their own grinder at home, a minority of our retail coffee business, thank goodness).

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Permalink Reply by Jonathan Hamilton on July 25, 2008 at 10:52am

Joseph said:

If you get a portion control grinder , you are only able to have one type of coffee in the hopper at a time. It grinds a measured amount of coffee,which you can adjust for your situation. A dual portion control is OK if you only plan on ever offering, say, one regular and one decaf.Most coffee houses prefer the opportunity to offer more coffee options including possibly different styles of brewing special coffees.

In defense of portion-control grinders, FETCO does have additional hoppers and hopper racks available for their models. You can still offer have plenty of coffees available.

However, if you're going to be selling whole-bean coffee by weight, you'll have a scale anyway, and you should get more consistent brews weighing the beans out yourself. There's not much reason to pay more money just to eliminate that simple step.

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Permalink Reply by Josh:D on July 25, 2008 at 2:05pm

We tried having multiple bins and bin racks for our fetco portion control grinder. The problem is that the grind adjustment is still by time. Because of the differences in density of bean, friction of coffee oils, etc, if we used more than 1 bean for each side - we saw substantial differences in ground weight. We ended up weighing our bean before grinding in the hoppers, then finally switching back over to a bulk grinder. With practice, weighing before grinding can be a quick and still controlled process.

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Permalink Reply by Sarah on December 4, 2008 at 12:36pm

We are switching to freshly grinding our own coffee for drip at a very busy espresso cart, so speed and space are both an issue. We brew into airpots with fetco brewers and are trying to decide between bulk grinders and portion control grinders. If we go with portion control, we will still have a bulk grinder on site for bulk sales and decaf drip.

Any suggestions? Pitfalls I'm missing on either one? Experiences?

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Permalink Reply by Banks Thomas on December 4, 2008 at 1:29pm

Don't get the portion control grinder. Not only do they limit your offering, they also seem to break more often than bulk grinders. I doesn't take much longer to weigh and grind your coffee, so just buy one grinder.

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