what's up everyone Lance Hedrick here and today's video on distribution methods is going to blow your [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] mind we're going to take a look at all of these different distribution methods we're going to check out their efficacies and we're going to see what the data shows us the best but before you just jump straight to the data that's in the caption below and use it for your own whatever I need you to listen to all that I have to say it's very important and there's also some specul I'll offer at the end
that I think is going to be a little bit more helpful for you to understand what we're seeing in one single session I pulled about 100 double shots of espresso so I used a single batch of coffee that was roasted all at once single origin Allin one temperature one humidity and so I made sure it was all good took me multiple hours so obviously I was up late into the night and it's you know that's not unusual for me I have issues sleeping I'm sure a lot of you do as well it's a common side
effect of these types of crazy people like you and me who are obsessive about coffee now this actually leads me to A short segment by today's sponsor which is better help I've struggled with insomnia and some other things for many years and a lot of that is you know related to the anxiety and stress that a lot of us are feeling especially under the current economic dress of the world and just all the responsibilities that we have and it's not a fun time and talking to someone can often help I know it's helped me greatly
it's helped my wife greatly and I know it's helped a lot of my friends greatly as well better help is an awesome online resource that is very affordable wherein you get matched to your own therapist after answering just a few simple questions and you're able to have either group therapy sessions or single therapy sessions you can take notes in the app and in the end you're just trying to better your mental health helps with your sleep it helps with your day-to-day operations it helps with your communication with other people and your relationships in general and
it helps with your relationship with yourself and if you are interested in trying out better help today I highly recommend you check out the link in the description below which is w www.health.com ledrick you'll get 10% off your first month with this and I think it's something that a lot of us could definitely use full transparency obviously it does help the channel when you click that link so I don't want that to be a hidden type of thing thanks better help for sponsoring the video and let's get into uh some extraction nerdery thanks so Coffee
Roasters here in Porto they donated the couple of kilograms for this testing first off we have the swars wdt tool obviously you could use really any wdt tool but the idea with this is to isolate manual wdt as one of the methods I have 35 mm acupuncture needles on this I was doing a spirographic pattern what I call the Moon and Earth technique so I was doing spins from the very bottom and slowly coming up doing little circles in a revolution and then right after because that bed was fluffed up I gave it one firm
tap on the table as we saw in my previous video linked right there this gives me the most consistent extractions and so I double temped using The Descent next we have the moon raker which is automatic tool in a way I guess where you kind of spin it and all these different size needles are going in a spirographic pattern like a watch kind of with those gears throughout the bed at miscellaneous depths I took it in the Porta filter and then I would do half turn half turn that's one half turn half turn two and
I did that all the way to 10 at this Cadence one 2 one two one two all the way to 10 then I'll give it a firm tap same way as with the wdt then I'll double Tamp it this is the distributor previously known as the OCD it has these four fins on the bottom I set it to a depth to where it almost fully compressed the puck I left a couple of millimet of tamping cuz this is how I see most people using it I would take my grounds after I dosed it I would
put it in the basket and then without touching it I would put the NCD in 1 2 3 4 5 6 double tamped it and we're good to go go we have this 3D printed spirographic tool which I have linked below where I got this from this has a knob on the top and in the same way as the Moon rer it goes in a spirographic pattern using 3D printed gears I did 10 revolutions on this so starting with the knob here I would go 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 very
simple this has 2 4 mm needles on it after I was done with all the revolutions I gave it a simple tap then Double T this right here is the auto comb you put it on the Porta filter you lock it in onto the flaps and then you push the needles down into the bed now this is not spirographic they have a predictable pattern with this little ribed column in the middle you put your hand on it and you go the full distance of your hand one 2 3 you don't want to go too fast
cuz you can shoot the grounds out to the edges which can cause issues you don't want to go too slow cuz it's not being as effective as it otherwise could be you do two to three of those I tried out both and saw there was no real difference at least statistically significant difference then I gave a slight tap and a Double T and then finally we have the Weber workshops blind Shaker this is literally just a dosing cup you dose grounds into here you lift this out you know you tap the grounds out into your
Porta filter so what I did with this is I would grind way put it in here I put the lid on I shook kind of in this circular way and the idea was I was homogenizing the grounds and I did that for 5 seconds some of the grounds would cake up in the lid so I just tap tap tap to make sure all the grounds got into the actual bed and then I'd take out the Bell knock it into the basket so I just tapped a little bit to ensure that it was level and then
double tamped and then the last thing I did was horizontal tapping took the dose put it in my basket no distribution no shaking just tapping it until it settled down and was [Music] [Applause] [Music] leveled I used the Weber workshops eg1 and it's because I found it to be the most consistent grinder out of all of my arsenals when I'm doing testing and yes I've tried a ton of different Grinders as far as being able to keep a static grind setting and as far as having the least amount of retention without having to do anything
crazy this has been the most consistent for me so I used this with the core burs I did not direct dose into Porta filters this is why context is so important I did not do that and it's because I wanted to be as anal as possible on getting all of my [Music] measurements I'd keep my Porta filter in the machine to make sure it was hot and then I would grind into this dosing jar then I would pop out the basket momentarily while it's still hot I'd wipe it down and I would put it on
my aaya pixus which is accurate to 05 G and I would make it exactly 20 20. G with a 05 G accuracy then I would place it in here and then I would do the distribution since I'm dosing all of them into here there is inherent distribution once I lift this Bell it's going to be better than direct from a grinder whenever you're grinding direct from a grinder it tends to pick a side or to over concentrate in a certain area and that's really hard to undo this is automatically giving you a better distribution than
if you were to do nothing at all if you were to just grind into a filter tap and Tamp versus grind into this release tap and Tamp this is automatically going to do a bit better some of these results will be different on a grind direct to Porta filter setup my first ever coffee job we received coffee from a rooster that wanted us to feature them and I was eight months into being a Bree I knew nothing about coffee and I was dialing in their coffee on our maer majors and I remember only half of
the bottom of the basket was being saturated with the coffee and I was really confused because that didn't happen with our normal coffee and I just chalked it up to well it must be the coffee because when I pull our coffee it doesn't happen well what was actually happening is that mozer heavily heavily favors one side of the basket when you're grinding into it and no matter the amount of horizontal tapping I would do it was not Distributing the grounds properly enough to overtake that preference the grinder was giving now it wasn't happening to our
normal coffee cuz it was such a Darkly roasted coffee that it wasn't experienc as much static buildup but this newer coffee was quite light and it was experiencing a lot more static on the exit this is just kind of an example of how drastic grinding into Porta filters can be typically on demand Grinders have a lot more clumping and so some of these techniques will be better for Grinders that have a lot more clumping we're using the Unica Pro Set to 93° C with a pre-infusion moves to full infusion at six bar we're using a
flat 9 bar profile all of our different Espress machines are going to have different water debits and that's going to skew testing quite a bit as far as how that puck is initially experiencing that work first water flow so what I did with the Unica Pro is it has this scene called a p factor which kind of talks between the flow rate and the pressure early on in pre-infusion and so this helps to negate inconsistencies from machine to machine so it has kind of a pre-infusion period prior to hitting flat n Bar until the end
of the shot so my shot times are close to 36 to 42 or so seconds which seems abnormal but in reality this allowed me to focus more on the efficacy of extraction because we see in our data that there's no real a correlation between time and extraction yield opted to use a VST basket so we can see what is a more real world experience for those of you at home and in cafes once I got to what I could do on my Google Sheets I I sent it to both Dr G and Dr smar and
I was like okay what I'm seeing seems kind of wild um help me know what I can say with confidence on these data s immedi mediately said wow this is great data and Jonathan was like this is incredibly interesting I'm a little scared to say it because I think that there's going to be a lot of backlash I'm going to be honest with you this is similar to The Niche video I made about two years ago there's there's a fear here uh but I'm just presenting you what I got over eight shots of each and
what is statistically significant from those results and then I'll offer a few speculations what we can say with significance with statistical significance is the highest extracting out of all these was just using the blind shaker yes this statistically significantly was 7% higher than majority of the other options it was insane Dr smurk told me they use in the Zurich lab when they're doing all these studies they use just the blind Shaker they don't fool around with wdt in their lab they just shake and they Tamp and they go and they say it's very consistent and
actually Doug Weber at Weber has been preaching that this is all you really need for a long time he told me this years ago and I just never really believed him and the reason is because when you shake you're kind of caking those grounds it's antithetical to what you think you would need but in reality it's giving you the most efficient extraction how can we eat the highest extraction no that's not what this is about it shows us what is most effective as at extraction because as I said we didn't see any statistically significant and
with any confidence of correlation between time and extraction yield you would think at the 40-second Mark you would be hitting as much extraction as possible so a little bit more time should Aid in a little bit more extraction a little bit less a little bit less extraction but in reality that wasn't really affecting the extraction yield so we can somewhat confidently say that the biggest difference from these results is the efficacy of water flow through the puck this one just won across the board on extraction yield and on consistency pretty insane when you're looking at
those graphs and of course I have the raw data you can access as well on a hyperlink down below how is it that the autocom extracted the least how is it that my manual wdt was a little bit less than my horizontal tapping well that's why I said context is so important I think that in and of itself is doing enough positive distribution that it is affecting and skewing what is actually coming out I think that on a commercial grinder or an on- demand grinder where you're grinding direct into Porta filter there are enough clumps
that it is necessary to do some sort of extra distribution to even that out and this is where I think arguably the autocom and the moon r and those things can help to redistribute That Base to an acceptable level arguably this is already doing a better job than that if we were to add the autocom or the moon rer something to this and did a full redistribution we're going to harm what this is already doing the NCD consistently extracts half a perent to 1 full per less than just tapping I've never seen a study say
otherwise let's say that but in this it was pretty much the same as tapping when I was dumping it in the bottom layer was already pretty well distributed and so all this was doing was just kind of compressing the top of bit all my tapping was doing was settling the top of bit so I wasn't really messing up the bottom with needles but with these other ones and the reason they didn't perform as well is because that bottom was already distributed pretty well by just dosing it using this magic tumbler and the easiest way to
prove that is the fact that NCD performs so well here because normally it doesn't but I think it's because it's doing almost what horizontal tapping is doing it's not affecting the bottom layers the bottom layers are already good and the reason there's so much criticism on this in cafes is it's not doing anything to the bottom layers so from a direct to grinder those bottom layers are already messed up this isn't helping it in fact it's just compacting that bad and bottom layer and it's creating bad shots or lower extracting shots I never advocated for
going direct to Porta filter because I always saw that there was more inconsistencies than when I dosed into something and you can see see me saying this on miscellaneous forms and in past videos granted I would always wdt afterwards just a bit because I didn't like the look of cing but it seems that I am likely unsettling it a bit with extra wdt or you have something like malun ig's little 10 cup which can fit directly into your 58mm Porta filter you can put it like this you can shake and this will likely help in
a similar way and maybe you try just surface level wdt but what I'm seeing is the caking I'm seeing in my that blind tumbler it didn't affect it every time I did it I thought this isn't going to pull well and it always did it was always giving me the highest and best and most consistent extraction maybe we've been going Overkill with wdt unless you have a clumpy grinder or unless you are intent on going direct to Porta filter in which case it probably is pretty helpful What doug was telling me is he actually prefers
to use the moon raker after doing the shake with this just doing two twists nothing intense nothing to upset the grounds just enough to kind of settle the grounds into place prior to tamping and maybe that would be the same with kind of like surface level wdt after you use the blind Shaker this all also depends on your setup I can only speak with what I have found to be the most consistent setup for my testing that these are the results and this is how it works and then I'm offering speculation on top of that
I'm curious what you think is this frustrating to you or is this you know enlightening as this like oh breath of fresh air maybe we have been over complicating things and we don't need all of that or is this like I want to try this out myself well if you do please let me know Dr G has offered to create graphs for anyone who wants to send a significant sample size the way that I did with like 60 shots or so just make sure you're using a quality coffee that's single origin and preferably a single
batch and yeah start pulling shots and make sure that you have a consistent methodology as you're pulling it with some pretty precise gear and and share that because I would love to expand upon this but I think for now that's everything that I have I hope it was helpful I hope that you learned something and I hope that this leads to you Brewing some better coffee thanks again to better help for sponsoring today's video thank you for sitting through and listening to all of the methodology and context again you can check out everything below as
well as my patreon which is really helpful when people join it subscribing really helps uh and you can check out my second YouTube where I rant on a lot of stuff but in the patreon I you know do a lot of giveaways through competitions it'd be cool if you went and join there and we have a rumbling Discord where we talk about uh things like this but anyway I think that's about it so I hope that you brew something tasty today and cheers
