Single Dosing - How & why

Single dosing your coffee grinding...

Have you heard of this? Do you do it? Why would you do this? Does this method suit you?

Let’s have a look and answer some of these questions. Who knows maybe at the end of this read I will have a few of you adopting this method.

Let’s quickly cover what this is so we can look at some of the benefits involved in single dosing.

Single dosing is, as you may have guessed from the name, weighing out a single dose of coffee beans, then grinding through an empty grinder, the idea, to get out exactly what you put in. Chances are if you have a coffee grinder at home, it has a place, called a hopper, that you pour a bulk amount of beans into. Single dosing effectively removes the use of the hopper, only placing in the exact amount of beans you need to grind to make the coffee.

So you may be asking, why would I want to bother weighing out say 18g of coffee beans every time I use my grinder? Seems harder right? Well bare with me for one moment, it really isn’t harder, it just takes changing some

of your processes.

So let me just say, this method is not for everyone. If you are the real no fuss coffee maker, that just wants the simplest easiest cup of coffee every time you walk up to the machine, this is probably not for you. There is nothing wrong with that by the way, some people love the ritual of making coffee, always trying to improve and learn. Then some people just want to drink a nice coffee with no fuss, I totally see why that is too, like coffee is great, everyone wants to drink it, not everyone wants to geek out on the whole process, I like wearing clothes, doesn’t mean I like making them. This method is also not designed for high volume coffee, a dose on demand grinder is best for this situation.

For most home users, that are willing to put a small amount of effort in, you will gain huge benefits from this method. Leaving coffee in your hopper for an extended period of time will reduce its quality rapidly, and essentially make it go stale pretty quickly. For the home user that doesn’t go through the whole hopper in a day this essentially means your either throwing away good coffee or not getting the most from your beans. If you are in a house where people drink different coffee beans (maybe decaf, a blend and a single origin for example), or maybe would like to have more than one option of beans in the future then this becomes far easier with single dosing. Now as I have preached before (and will continue to into the future) please weigh your dose & yield!!! (I know not everyone is going to do this, and that’s cool, but I’m telling you it is the first step to you improving your coffee game immensely). If you have taken my advice on this, or intend on starting to weigh from here on out, then pre-weighing your doses and keeping the hopper empty makes this easy and streamlined. It also helps with grind adjustments, on a traditional grinder, if you adjust the grind to dial your coffee in, you will need to purge some retained grinds adding unnecessary waste, this way you make your adjustment and just throw the next dose in, much more efficient.

Here are a few tips to make this easy and efficient. You will need a set of coffee scales, these don’t need to be super expensive acaia style scales (they are cool and all, but let’s be honest they just weigh stuff), spend what your comfortable with. For people starting out I recommend something like this, for only $16 here in Australia with free shipping, you really can’t go wrong.

Secondly, get yourself something to use as dosing jars. I will leave this up to you, find something that fits your style and budget. You can use anything from test tubes with corks (like the Weber workshop stuff), little glass jars, small tins, or even small plastic containers will do the job, air tight containers of any kind is what we are aiming for.

Examples of dosing containers

Now you have the gear and are setup ready to go, we will cover a simple processes. When you first go to your coffee machine weigh up roughly however many doses you require for the day at your desired amount and place them in containers. If you are not sure about how much to dose, click here for a post all about dosing to your basket. This now means you are ready to go for the day, obviously you can always dose up more if needed. Then simply dial you grind in as per usual and all you need to concentrate on is weighing your yield and the extraction itself, click here for a post on dialing in. At the end of the day when you close the machine, there is no need to empty beans out of the hopper and purge the remaining coffee (yay this means less effort and less waste). It is also worth mentioning that not all grinders work well with this method, some retain too much coffee, others popcorn really badly without weight from the beans, this will cause other problems. However if your setup suits single dosing, or when you are looking at your next grinder, maybe look at a grinder that works well with this method, you will end up with better tasting coffee, less waste and more accurate streamlined dosing.

Some grinders that work well with this are:

• Niche Zero (filter & espresso), this grinder is actually designed as a single dose grinder and my personal favourite.

• EK43 (espresso & filter), however most people don’t carry these grinders at home.

• Baratza Sette 270 series (espresso), I don’t recommend the 270wi, with its learning function single dosing can mess with the grinder.

• Fellow Ode grinder (filter), I have seen some issues with this grinder not becoming fine enough with original burrs.

• Baratza Encore (filter), this is a great grinder for the price and one I recommend for people enjoying filter coffee.

• Precision grinder, these guys make a few different models, all work well with single dosing.

If you have any questions relating to single dosing, grinder questions or really anything else. I’m always contactable by commenting below or through Instagram.