On Vario

Troubling times: Swine flu is threatening to go pro (as in pandemic), and even worse is that the Flames got eliminated yesterday in a series that went from a nicely matched one to an utterly embarassing slaughter. Okay, maybe I’m being melodramatic (and not dramatic enough about the swine flu, but I’ve been castigated before, on this very site, for being deluded), but hockey really does matter here (“here” being Canada, not just in Calgary), it defines the local ethos, it’s something that one can’t help getting swept up in, and when Mighty Casey strikes out (sorry about mixing metaphors), it’s, well, it’s tragic.

Add to all that: the damned weather. Yes, it’s Spring, absolutely, the tulips and those bizarre weeds with the oak-crossed-with-clover leaves, the little turmeric staining flowers and as I discovered last week the bizarrely orange (and even more turmeric-like) roots are growing; the trees and bushes are budding in some rare cases starting to leaf out, and the days are, regardless of the temps, really getting long en route to “too long” in a few weeks. BUT it’s cold, no-shorts cold, and it’s depressing. High today was maybe 2 and it was blustery and mostly gray to boot. So, yeah, it’s my sort of elongated “summer” but too much negative stuff in the way to enjoy it.

So I bought a new toy. My clever title is a pun- the “Vario” is the new coffee grinder from Baratza, the folks who made an outrageously big-selling burr grinder for Starbucks, and the makers of the well-respected Virtuoso and Maestro, which are both relatively inexpensive but good-quality consumer machines that are not especially well-reviewed for the demands of espresso, which has finer, and more exacting, grinding requirements than do drip or French press brewing methods. In fact one often hears that the grinder is more important than the espresso machine and I’m inclined to agree. I can get decent espresso, if I have to, from my 15-year-old Krups Espresso Novo, which I paid $130 for; but if I had to use a cheap grinder (like my old Braun) with my $1600 Elektra Leva espresso machine, I’d get nothing but crap from it, because the Braun could simply not grind fine enough for espresso and its burrs were tiny and cheap.

I already have a good grinder- a Rancilio Rocky with a “doser,” which is the paddle that you see baristas thwack-thwacking the coffee grounds out of the grinder and into the portafilter with at most caffes. Brian bought it for me (well, for us really) here in Calgary at, I think, Mr Cappuccino, and that was less than four years ago. It still works and I’ve done a pretty good job of keeping it clean. But it’s beaten up, with a cracked bean receptacle and a broken spring for the doser. I also wanted a doserless grinder, one that grinds directly into the portafilter instead of having to do the “thwack thwack,” a procedure that’s supposed to deposit a measured amount of grounds into the filter but one that is very imprecise in that regard and that requires a superfluous extra step for me. Dosing does break up clumps in the grounds, but there are downsides to it for me, including the fact that my machine (my Elektra, not my Brasilia) has a nonstandard (small) sized portafilter, so I can’t play professional barista and dose into the portafilter; instead I dose into this little tupperware container and then feed it into my portafilter. I wanted to not do that anymore. One more thing: Rocky is loud. Not as loud as many grinders, but loud enough when our bedroom and kitchen share a wall.

So I’d been reading product overviews of the Vario on coffeegeek and elsewhere and decided this past weekend to give it a whirl. It turns out that Phil and Sebastian (Calgary Farmers’ Market, see “places I like”) are stocking  it, so I took the plunge. $489 (Canadian), a few bucks more than I’d seen it list at the only other Canadian source I could find, but that was in Vancouver, so here we are. My coffee shrine looks like this now:

Left to right are the Elektra Microcasa a Leva, Brasilia Lady, and the Vario. The Leva has to be to one side or the other so we can open the upper cupboard.

Closeup of Vario:

There are lots of buttons. What they do is allow you to grind “manually” for however long you care to (up to two minutes I think) or to use preset times for grinding. I measured beans and did the former to allow me to determine how long it took to grind a dose of beans for each of my espresso machines, and then I easily programmed the buttons below it, using the “espresso” button for the Leva and the “drip” button for the Lady. These buttons do NOT change the GRIND of the coffee, but rather the amount of coffee that is ground. I dialed in the grind using the guides to the right and left of the panel. The right slider is “macro” level with fineness increasing bottom to top (top is labelled “espresso,” which is confusing and misleading- more on that in a bit); the right slider is a micro-level “fineness” setting for each of the “macro” settings. Think of it like derailleurs on a bike: One gear shifts the “macro” front gears, and you have five to seven gradations in the back, set with the other gear shifter, for each of those front cogs. Same thing here (I think; not sure about “cogs”).

So I’ve deduced, for now, that it takes 22 seconds to grind a double in the Lady’s big 58mm bottomless portafilter, so I’ve programmed the button labelled “filter” for that espresso machine:

…and 14.5 seconds for the smaller Elektra, whose portafilter is 49mm in diameter. Same grind–they both make espresso–but a smaller amount of coffee, and so I’ve programmed the button labelled “espresso” for it:

These settings I arrived at via trial and error. Fun and delicious trial and error.

NOW you may notice that the right slider is nowhere near “espresso,” and this is what I was getting at when I mentioned how these labels are misleading. I tried my first espresso with the setting at “espresso,” slider up to the top, and the COARSEST “micro” setting, expecting a gusher with such “coarse” grinds. Nope, not even close; the coffee was like Turkish powder and not a single drop came out. Too fine- WAY to fine. I had to (after many tries) go three full “macro” clicks from the top. What this means is, given this grinder’s factory settings (which can be reset but which I lack the proper tool for), “espresso” is going to be closer to the middle of the settings. This isn’t just confusing; it also means that the “press” setting will be way too fine even at the very bottom of both sliders. Now I don’t drink much French press at all, but this is still a bit concerning and I’d like to get it readjusted- but the problem there is having to relearn the settings I have now, settings I burnt though more than a half pound of coffee beans to uncover. But I’ll think about that later. The point for now is that Baratza might have made things simpler by just labelling both sliders “coarse” and “fine” and by just labelling the bottom timed buttons, I don’t know, maybe just “1,2,3.”

I can say that I am THRILLED with the shots I’ve been getting, the quiet and the sexy build of this new grinder, and that I’m more than happy with my purchase. Some kinks remain to be worked out, naturally, but there’s a lot to be excited about here.