After watching Lance’s video about slow feeding, I got really curious and wanted to see if I could improve the grind quality on my hand grinders and, more importantly, how it would affect the taste.
For this test, I used three NextLevel Pulsar Mini, with the same recipe, same water, same filters, same temperature, etc. Everything was calibrated around a target grind size of Pietro at setting 7. I only brewed filter coffee for now; maybe I’ll test espresso later.
Normal grinding
I held the grinder the usual way, almost vertically, and ground at a normal speed.
Tilted grinding
I held the grinder almost horizontally and tried to make sure the beans were feeding into the burrs gradually.
Slow feeding
I don’t have a motorized stand for hand grinders where I could attach a proper slow feeder, so I had to manually drop around 3 beans into the hopper at a time. It was pretty annoying, but I made it through :)
In most cases, the best results came from just grinding normally: 8 wins.
Slow feeding came next with 6 wins.
Tilting only worked well on 2 grinders.
So basically, in the default position, the cups were usually more complex and closer to what I think the grinder was designed to produce. Acidity, body, sweetness everything felt balanced and natural. But as soon as I started messing with the normal feeding logic, problems started to show up.
For example, K7 worked really well with slow feeding. The cup became much cleaner and easier to read. In the normal position, there was a bit more noise, and with the tilt, the cup became very flat, with underdeveloped acidity and poor balance.
S3 gave me the best cup in the normal position. But once I tilted it, the result got worse. With slow feeding, the grind seemed to shift more toward fines, and the cup became unbalanced.
K6 actually performed really well when tilted. I managed to reduce some of the dustiness in the grind, and the cup became cleaner. In the normal position, the cup was worse, and slow feeding didn’t really help.
So my main takeaway is that every grinder needs its own experiment. There doesn’t seem to be one universal rule here. You really have to test your specific grinder to see whether you can improve the grind this way or not.
The annoying part is the practical side. Holding a hand grinder at an angle is tiring and uncomfortable, while a stand + slow feeder costs money. So if you want to improve something like the K7, for example, you’ll either need to buy a setup or build one yourself, and that can get expensive. On the other hand, if you do build a stand, you could end up with a pretty nice station for both espresso and filter coffee.
P.S. Also, while slow feeding seems questionable on some conical hand grinders, most tests with 64 mm flat burr electric grinders show that it’s basically necessary if you want a cleaner, more readable, brighter cup. It also works really well on the Pietro.
P.S. Yes, I know that slow feeding and grinding at an angle shift the particle distribution toward a coarser fraction, but simply grinding finer does not lead to an improvement.
It’s hard for me to explain, but the cup changes on the level of particle geometry. Something seems to break down, and the taste of the cup changes for the worse.