As a follow up to the issue I’ve had with lateral play in the burr shaft of the grinder; I’ve had a very productive email exchange with Marko from BB over the last few days & have to say their customer service as usual has been exemplary.
He is of the opinion that the amount of movement I’m experiencing is outside the tolerance that is expected & will replace the grinder.
Whether on the back of this or not; I understand there has also been some discussions between BB, Manufacturer & @DavecUK regarding some improvements to the design, which are going to result in a V2 version of the grinder in the near future. Other than some improvements to the bearing quality I don’t have any information what these design changes will entail.
So rather than replace the grinder with the existing version; Marko has suggested that I hold on to it until the V2 is available at which point they will exchange it for the revised version.
This has now also given me a chance to use it to do some grinds for my coffees at work. For my Picopresso I had it set to around 35 clicks & the motor was struggling, with the charge indicator rapidly dropping from its full charge to 2 led’s in the 3 min it took to grind 15g of a medium/light roast.
On the 2nd Picopresso grind it did stop grinding with no led’s lit & I had to switch to using it as a hand grinder instead. The subsequent pour over grinds for my B75 @ 90 clicks was more successful (I started with 70, then 80 but the draw down was too long). Even with the depleted battery it did these no problem as when the grinder was running under no load it was showing 3 lit led’s.
So it seems that in it’s current guise it looks like the motor struggles when approaching espresso grind setting & manual will be the way to go. Maybe there’s a battery issue, but I can persevere with that in the interim
Putting that aside, none of the subsequent coffees had any unpleasantness, there was more body than I would usually get but it didn’t dominate the characteristics of the coffee. For the Pico shots I was in the right ballpark for the grind setting according to the reference in the instructions & for the B75 I was having to set it quite a bit coarser, more into the French press range to get the draw down I was after, which I’m guessing is probably due to the extra fines produced by those conicals & maybe the burr play too compared to the grinder I would normally be using. So not an entirely negative experience & looking forward to the emergence of the V2.
Thanks again to Marko. Customer service at it’s finest. :-)
