Lagom P100

dfk41

DavecUK

Not so long ago 64mm was not so common but now it seems as if everyone and his dog are making 64mm grinders and it’s now the most popular segment of the market. After a while staying there, perhaps the focus will begin to turn to the next largest burrs with 83mm and 80 mm being too close to 64mm. I would hope that I and dfk41 are not the only consumers who want a 98mm grinder but aren’t willing to pay as much as 3k aud for it! :) after all I don’t think having a Veblen-type attitude towards grinders is likely to give us what we want as grinder consumers…

On the philos, it is still cheaper than the zerno and the p64 so it’s still within premium 64mm territory. I was tempted by the idea that getting the philos would bring me very near 98mm territory but at 64mm prices, but in the end I just could not believe that it would represent a significant enough improvement over my df64 to justify the outlay, and ultimately this used p100 was not that much more expensive than a new philos so it was an obvious decision to make to choose the p100!

I just did another shot earlier and if I don’t use the clicker, the difference is about 0.2 or 0.3g with the overall result after clicker use being virtually zero retention. I didn’t see much coming out of the chute at all when the motor went into the Max rpm to purge the grinder unlike Lance hedrick’s review so I don’t think this is the results of regrinding at all unlike his supposition. I will measure again tomorrow when I use it again.

DavecUK

Well this is interesting. The rpm dial was a little north of 4 yesterday so I set it at 3 because that setting was the one hedrick chose for his review. At 3 and from 16g of beans, rhe p100 produced 15.4 without using the clicker. Once the clicker was twacked just a couple of times, it became zero retention. So about 0.6g in the chute, quite a lot but that’s what the clicker is for.

Then I set it at 4 to see what happened again for 16g of beans. This time, without even using rhe clicker, it was 15.9g!

I will use it more to see if these results holds up. But if so, then it suggests that at the speed hedrick chose for his review which is the lowest speed threshold that is recommended by lagom, the p100 retains far more grinds in the chute.

But there is no basis for hedrick’s assumption that it cannot all be in the chute and has to be from the burrs and so it is being reground. Does he have any evidence for suggesting the chute is too small to keep a mere 0.6g of grinds in there? Like Dave said in the HB Forum, if hedrick had even opened up the p100 to see how much grinds were left in the burrs themselves, he could have seen it was not caused by regrinding. I would have thought the simpler conclusion is that it is all in the chute because it is all evacuated by the clicker. So no regrinding…

And even the chute retention appears to be greatly reduced by just going 1 speed setting higher. In fact could it be that if hedrick had chosen to do his review at 4 rpm setting, none of the grinding issues he highlighted as the main grouse he had with the p100 - which is not actually a real issue - would appear at all… I seem to recall from reading comments by owners of the p100 and 01 that they typically chose speeds of at least 4 or higher so why choose 3 for the review? This is a real problem with his review because it may unfairly create a skewed idea of the p100…
A more likely explanation to me is that at 3, the burrs do not generate enough force to push all the powder down the chute into the cup and leaves some behind in the chute. However just a little faster and most of the remaining powder is pushed out.

On his other criticisms, the neat clicker that my p100 has is an improvement over the click button that hedrick’s review unit had, and is a vertical bar that is pushed down. But because the top of the bar is set lower than the level of the top of the grinder and because the depth of the pushing surface on the bar is large enough to put your finger entirely on it without needing to have the leverage of a thumb or another finger on the rest of the grinder, one will never put his finger on top of the indicator ring to push the bar down and so will not disturb its position.

Also the indicator ring ob my p100 does not readily move and u have to consciously push it to change its position.

I have the versa cup same like his review unit had but unlike hedrick, I actually like its quality and massive build and find no difficulty handling it. I am getting a 3d printed cover for it so that I can use it like a weber magic tumbler. I don’t understand why he seems to find it easy knocking his versa tumbler over because mine stays on the forks just fine. Maybe it’s because he keeps moving the grinder around while the cup is in the grinder but I don’t think normal users would move the p100 from its position while using it. Its great weight alone keeps it well planted on the counter so well that an accidental nudge by ones hand on it wouldn’t move it anyway.

As for his subjective finding that the coffee made by a titus aligned ek43 with the same burrs tastes better than that made from the p100, he did not say that those findings were backed up by blind testing. Likewise for his referencing other people who also came ot he same conclusion at his lab - did they do it via blind testing? Hedrick thinks very highly of the ek43 (“the king of grinders?”) and it along with the weber eg-1 (he admits it is his favourite grinder) to be his choice of the standard setting titan grinders - so if he knew that those shots came from the titus aligned ek43, he would be predisposed to think more highly of them. Anyway the HB forum on his review had some people who own or use the p100 and the ek or a titus nautilus and they say that there is no difference in the cup between the p100 and the ek or titus nautilus with the same ssp burrs. If so then that casts doubt on his assumption that the difference is attributed to the ek’s prebreaking auger.

I also find his criticism of not being able to see the dial of fhe p100 because it is not inclined like the p64 to be bizarre and strange because I am not tall at all but I have no issue seeing the indicator dial and what setting rhe grinder is at at all.

I have found ghe vast majority of hedrick’s reviews to be useful and interesting even if i dont agree all the time with his conclusions, but ultimately i think this review by him Is off base altogether because his conclusion on the p100 is based on either trivial matters that do not even turn out to be justified in the latest version of the p100, or are subject to the lowest recommended setting of 3 being selected for the rpm - not that there is actually any negative effect done at setting 3 anyway. He further exacerbated the negative effect of his comments by unnecessarily mentioning twice during his video one of his friends who had replaced his p100 to go back to the eg-1 which would reinforce the idea he places the eg1 as the end all grinder.

This is unfortunate because it may have caused a significant number of people not to consider the p100 based on his mistaken reasoning. Even from the comments on his youtube review page of the p100, there were a number of those people who said words to that effect. Which is a shame because even with the advent of the 01, I hope option-o does not discontinued entirely the p100 (I notice its webpage on their site has not said it is discontinued) because it is still a very well made piece of kit comparable to anything out there, and to my eyes anyway it looks a lot better aesthetically than the 01.

dfk41
In this case however the many comments on the YouTube review page suggests that there were many dissuaded from the p100 by his review, unfairly so to the p100 which has no stalling issues unlike the eg-1 amd 01 and which is 60 per cent cheaper than the made in Taiwan eg-1 and much cheaper than every other titan grinder except the 01 while having less retention than the titus aligned ek43 and monolith max 2 and having a superior workflow than any of the other 98mm grinders.

Although I have found most of his videos to be informative and useful for me, I do not slavishly follow anyone’s conclusions and even before i bought the p100, i was unconvinced by his reasoning process in his review on the p100 and it did not dissuade me from buying it. I am glad that my actual experience with the grinder has justified my decision!

Cuprajake
I hope this puts a stop to more gear purchases at least for a long while! :) but of course, we have all heard that one before!

Just looking at it without any technical kmowledge at all, i expect there is probably a minimum speed at which any particular burr set will require vis a vis the dimensions and shape of any particular burr chamber and chute design in order to “push” the grounds out fast enough so that a minimum is retained in the chute. Not that it necessarily makes any difference to the quality of the coffee, but operatkng the grinder at the proper minimum apeed may give the clicker or twacker less work to do.