Okay, that title was clickbaity. But this is my very first post here, so let’s just let this one slide, shall we?

This post is a practical summary of Niche Zero facts and tips – based on my 1.5 years of using it both for espresso and filter, and learning/chatting about it on the internets. This grinder has been discussed a lot for the last couple years, but I haven’t yet seen all of these Niche-specific tips written in a single place.

I know what you are thinking:

But my buddy Lance Hedrick and other coffee gurus have recently DESTROYED the Niche! My V60 is literally undrinkable now!

And to an extent it’s indeed not the best filter grinder there is, but while Lagom P100 is out of stock (just like any grinder that claims to be good nowadays…) we might as well get the best out of what we have.

Seriously though, I’ve made around 300 V60s with the NZ so far and they were mostly not terrible at all. And maybe a thousand espressos, and they were delicious. And it looks great. And it’s incredibly convenient to use. And I had to wait for several months until they had it in stock on indiegogo. And the retention is small, however more on this later. Just to be upfront about it – IMO the Niche was a great purchase, and it shines in classic espresso which unfortunately happened to completely get out of the trend right now.

Anyway, as you probably know, the main issue with NZ amongst filter and turbo-fruity-shot folks like me, is the particle size distribution, which realistically is the only real output parameter there is in grinders – usability and retention aside. In particular, there are two main issues:

Issue #1. Lots of tiny coffee particles aka fines

It’s a good thing for classic style espresso as it gives it the body many people desire, but for filter the story is different. First, fines extract immediately and are prone to over-extraction especially with the long filter brew time, giving you that unpleasant bitter taste, although realistically they won’t contribute too much to the resulting extraction given how small of a fraction of the total volume they occupy, so this is probably not our biggest problem.

Second, and most annoyingly, they clog the filter, effectively turning your bright quick percolation V60 into an awkward slow dripping brew, stretching the brew times from 2-3 minutes to 5-6 or even more (I’ve had 20-minute V60s with coarse grinds), resulting in a muted over-extracted cup.

Check out this great Scott Rao’s article on fines, and Jonathan Gagne’s fantastic article on immersion vs percolation for more info.

Issue #2. Wide particle distribution peak

Instead of having the majority (hence the frequency distribution peak) of coffee grounds to be roughly the same size, it grinds into a much wider size range. We call the grounds inside that distribution peak boulders, as opposed to fines, which are much smaller.

And once again, this kind of distribution can be great for classic style espresso because it’s so forgiving – you can miss the theoretical “perfect grind setting” by several ticks and still produce an excellent cup, as there we are not targeting that precise clarity over body and creaminess. For filter we do, though, again, not just because of the taste preference but due to the longer brew time.

The problem is, that the smaller-sized part of the distribution peak – still boulders, but small boulders – is prone to over-extraction. Since we have so many of them compared to a more narrow distribution (and compared to the tiny amount of over-extracting fines which we do not care about), over-extracting these will probably have a significant negative effect on the resulting brew. Behold the muted cup, farewell the fruity notes.

In reverse, the larger-sized part of the peak – large boulders – will probably under-extract, but I would expect much less of a problem coming from that.

And that’s it! Now, let’s figure out the solutions for these problems when brewing filter coffee.

1. Grind MUCH coarser – way past the calibration mark

To be more precise, I’m often setting the grind size to the 0 mark (I mean, it’s literally called Niche Zero…) but after a full turn of the grinder wheel – see image below.

Niche Zero at the Zero mark Niche Zero at Zero mark

 

By grinding way coarser we are moving the sweet spot of the wide particle distribution into a more desirable range, maybe at the cost of under-extracting some large boulders in the very right area of the distribution. And while under-extracting is not great, it’s over-extracting that we are afraid of the most. Sure, you won’t have those 30% extraction yields, but our main goal here is to damage-control the taste.

Apparently, the “Filter Drip” and “Coarse” annotations between 30-50 ticks are a lie, as also reported by e.g. Patrik Rolf from April and Rohan from Pocket Science Coffee. Initially I trusted the markings so I was hesitant to try grinding past the calibration mark, but eventually I gave up and was surprised at the results. Moreover, I was always curious why people on youtube tend to have large fluffy grounds while mine were nothing like that. Well, now we know.

2. Reduce agitation

Remember brewing guides (e.g. by James Hoffmann, Lance Hedrick, and others) where it’s recommended to spin the V60 cone aggressively, including after bloom and between the consecutive pours? While it helps to even out the coffee bed, it also makes the fines stick to the filter and then clog it, which is particularly bad for the Niche, since it produces a lot of fines.

Just to give you a more practical idea of the agitation effect on clogging, for the same light roasted coffee beans I’ve had:

  1. V60 brews of 2 minutes without any agitation on the 25 mark;
  2. V60 brews of 5 minutes with heavy agitation at the calibration mark, so around 60 mark;
  3. Tricolate brew on the 50 mark (because they told me to grind finer than usual, so I did) with heavy agitation clogged so hard that I just stopped it after 20 minutes while it was around 60% done;
  4. Tricolate brew on the 0 full turn mark which also hard-clogged but was around 90% done.

As you can see, it’s too easy to confuse the effects of grind size and clogging based purely on the brew time, as the second one is significantly coarser than the first one but 2.5x times longer.

Another interesting observation is that clogged Tricolate brew (#3) was incredibly astringent whereas clogged V60 brew (#2) was muted and hollow but not astringent. My obvious hypothesis would be that in V60, clogging results in heavy bypass – water skipping the coffee bed and effectively diluting the brew. In the case of Tricolate though it has no way to escape the clogged filter below, so it just stays and overextracts. I’m yet to experiment more with Tricolate as I’ve only bought it recently. So far I haven’t had a single non-clogged brew, but I always agitated as otherwise the bed looked too uneven.

Pouring speed is another source of agitation apart from swirling. In my experience, exceeding around 3-4 ml/s results in noticeable drawdown slowdown. To avoid this I found Acaia Pearl’s flow rate indicator to be quite convenient – I’m trying to maintain the flow rate just above the first large dot.

So if you’re struggling with way longer than desired brew times, try starting without any agitation at all to see the difference, and then try carefully adding some of it. Usually with very coarse settings I tend to be just fine (pun intended) with aggressive swirling during the bloom phase, however swirling during final draw down often still results in clogging for me. You also might want to use a chopstick for the final swirl.

3. Lower the temperature

The point here is to prevent over-extracting those fines and the smaller-sized part of the distribution. Just like the previous point, this goes against most brew guides which recommend starting from boiling. In fact, I’m currently never going higher than 92-94C even for very light roasts. Every time I doubt myself and go higher, I get disappointed and go back.

As a side note, I’ve personally found brew temperature guides to be confusing – for kettles with the temperature holding function such as Fellow Stagg EKG, are we supposed to hold it boiling during the brew or not? Because during 3-4 min brew the temperature can drop from boiling to around 92C, if the kettle is empty enough.

Either way, keeping all variables the same and changing only temperature, I’ve got unbelievably better cups. One example of that:

  • starting from 98-100C, without temperature holding so it drops to ~92C in the end: muted, bitter, boring, almost no fruity notes
  • set and hold at 92C: bright, pleasant acidity, them peach oolong notes (you know what super hyped coffee I’m talking about, don’t you)

These three points are the most important ones in my experience to make filter coffee taste better with the Niche. Let’s throw in a few more which are also applicable to making espresso.

4. A controversial one, but… try grinding from frozen

Freezing the beans is an entirely different topic and I know how cumbersome and wasteful it is. However, some people have noticed that grinding from frozen changes the amount and kind of fines produced (see Scott Rao’s link above). Personally I haven’t researched the effects enough as I’m freezing the beans for preservation reasons. As an anecdotal evidence though, I’m able to agitate the V60 very aggressively at any moment without negative effects on the drawdown time with the coarse enough grind. Moreover, the espresso extraction process from frozen beans consistently looks much better visually with less noticeable channelling, but again I have no further data.

5. Bonus – use bellows to get proper Zero Retention™©®

Even though the “Zero” in the “Niche Zero” stands for “zero retention”, it’s not really zero. And of course they never claimed that it is exactly zero, more like 0.1g, but in practice even with regular cleaning I get up to 0.6g retention, mostly due to static. This is particularly relevant for espresso. Spraying water on the beans to reduce static is not recommended by Niche, so we need to do something else.

My figurative OCD (behaviour, not the company producing spinny distribution thingy which was super trendy before last year but now you get weird looks for mentioning it) does not allow me to have such outrageous output weight inconsistency, and I’d like to avoid weighting the portafilter and grinding more if needed.

On the other hand, I’ve seen some people suggesting intentionally keeping the grounds in as it’s mostly chaff and ultra-fines which we want to avoid anyway, but I couldn’t notice any taste difference.

So I bought this thing to blow the air from the top and force the remaining grinds out, bringing retention to practically zero. Also it’s a fun party trick when you tell your guests that this thing is used to make a baby burp…and also for coffee.

 

And that’s pretty much it! Of course there are lots of other things you can do to improve your filter and espresso brews, but they are not specific to the Niche, and therefore outside of the scope of this article.

Special thanks to folks from the Decent discord for lots of interesting discussions. In particular, thanks to Rohan B. for also proof-reading this post and providing excellent comments.

I’m sorry if I forgot to mention or put a reference to someone, as lots of people have been discussing this, and I’m not claiming that these ideas are originally mine. Also this was intended as a practical guide and not a full-blown literature review.

Additionally, I apologise for the absence of complicated mathematical equations and experimental charts which seems unimaginable nowadays in the world of coffee articles, but I hope it was still bearable.

Thanks for stopping by!





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