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Post by Fat Rabbit Coffee on Dec 20, 2022 10:41:49 GMT -5
I'm wondering how useful it is in a home/hobby setting.
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Post by lilypa on Dec 22, 2022 15:58:34 GMT -5
I have a 0-50 micron Hegman gauge that I used to use here and there. I've stopped using it though and just use my mouth these days. I used to compare what my tongue was telling me with the Hegman gauge, so it helped me calibrate my mouth. Since I make consistent batch sizes (mass), I developed a loosely general time of when to stop refining. Of course, origins can be quite different in terms of viscosity due to inherent cocoa butter content (I make two-ingredient bars) that I still sample-taste each batch after X hours of refining and then sample more frequently for the remainder until I'm ready to either stop the melangeurs or remove tension on the knobs (Premier tilting refiners).
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Post by Fat Rabbit Coffee on Dec 23, 2022 0:25:15 GMT -5
Yeah, I sort of assumed the gauge would be interesting for a bit but then much like my moisture meter, would end up sitting on the shelf collecting dust.
Is removing tension on the knobs part of your refining process? Using my Spectra, I tension it all the way minus just a smidge of a turn back and refine until I feel like I'm done. But other than maybe having the tension looser in the beginning to be more accommodating for bigger chunks, never considered doing anything with it once I got going to let it just sit and do its thing (sit 'n spin).
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Post by lilypa on Jan 10, 2023 14:27:19 GMT -5
Sorry for the very late reply. I first pre-grind my nibs with a cheap food processor for about 30 seconds before loading into my melangeurs. I usually set the "loading" tension on my melangeurs to full tension minus a full turn on the tensioning knob. Then maybe an hour or two after I've loaded all the nibs, I set the tension on the knobs to full minus a half-turn. Works for me. It's not scientific. I heard at a talk at one point that you get better shear and quicker refining if you DON'T use full tension, so I took that advice to heart.
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