Today, we're gonna talk about this.
It's just a little spray bottle
you can pick them up for cheap loads of places online.
This one's full of water
and more and more it seems like
it's becoming part of people's coffee kits.
So today we're gonna look at why are people using these?
What do they do?
Is this now a little coffee essential.
Now the basis for this is nothing particularly new
in fact, I've made a video kind of about the same thing
three, four years ago
to do with adding a little bit of water
to your beans before you grind them
to help mitigate static.
Take the droplet of water literally
and drop it on stir it into the beans
and then away you grind .
More recently though, these seem to have come into fashion.
Now behind me, you'll see five of the finest grinders
that money can buy
and I'm gonna be reviewing them over the course of a week,
culminating in a big head to head
but what was interesting to me
is that at least half of these grinders
came with a spray bottle,
which suggests something about this
is increasingly essential.
Now, just spraying a little bit of water onto those beans
adds about 0.1 of a gram of water.
So on a 18 to 20 gram dose
that's not much of an addition from that perspective.
It does massively reduce static
and I'll show you in a second
just how much difference that it makes.
Now, I was skeptical of this being better
than what I was doing before
but it's kind of easier in many ways.
I've fully gone on board with using the little spray bottle
over using the droplet technique
mostly because with this particular setup
I don't have a sink here
I'm just having this to hand means I can do a quick spray
as I weigh my beans and then away I go.
The difference is profound
when it comes to using many of these grinders
like night and day
and I will show you that in a second.
But it's not a perfect solution
and I'll talk about a couple of the issues that I have
as well as answer a few different questions
that you might have about using this thing
and whether you should get one
and whether it would work
for you and your particular workflow.
So first up, let's do some pretty simple testing.
I will grind the same dose of coffee in all five
in fact, let's do all six of these grinders
and I'll show you a side by side of me doing that
with those grinders.
You can judge for yourself
how much of an impact it has on retention and mess
both of which are a big issue.
I should add that this is not to comment on the grinders
this is just to show the difference
of a spray of water versus no spray of water.
Okay, so looking at that footage it seems pretty clear cut
that a little spritz of water
on your beans before you grind them
is a very good idea.
Helps with retention massively
if not completely remove static.
So am I saying everyone should use this every single time?
No, this is great
I do like this
it is now how I like to get rid of the static
when I'm grinding coffee
with any of the grinders that I use
but it does have a few issues
that may impact your particular workflow.
Firstly, if you're something like a niche user
chances are you dose in the thing that you grind back into.
spraying this with water is a recipe for disaster.
Ground coffee will stick to the inside of this
it will just, it's very bad.
Secondly, if the funnel into your burrs
is quite flat, it's not too steep
then you can have some sticking issues.
Grinders like the Niche or the EG-1 or even the Monolith
you can get some beans sort of sticking
on the funnel into the burrs,
which is a little bit frustrating.
The biggest issue I had was probably with the Niche
with the Anti popcorning disc in there as well
those two things meant
that if you'd sprayed the beans with a quite a bit of water
one good spray was usually enough
then you had some sort of stickage
of the beans on the funnel
and that was, that was very frustrating
so be aware of that.
And thirdly, if you do this all the time
you will get an accumulation of water
in quite a significant quantity around your grinder,
around your funnel, around your burr set
and I'm not sure that's a great idea.
Obviously, burrs themselves are exposed constantly
to whatever moisture is in the air
depending on where in the world you are
that can be quite a lot of moisture
but putting in this amount of liquid
I cannot say with a hundred percent confidence
that that won't cause any problems over time.
I think if you're dosing one dose of coffee a day
a little spritz is gonna be completely fine
but if you're dosing back to back to back to back
four or five, six, seven shots,
then you might have issues.
And from my point of view
as a message to all grinder manufacturers
this is a great little hack
but it doesn't mean you shouldn't be working
on a fix for your grinders more broadly.
I don't want to have to do this.
The ideal workflow is that this does not exist
I don't need it.
But right now with almost every grinder I've ever used
that is a single dose grinder, it kinda do
it is a pretty useful little thing.
Now, some of you and you know who you are,
some of you might say, ha ha,
what about the water in the bottle?
How much does that matter?
And that's a reasonable question I guess.
The answer is this,
it doesn't matter that much.
I tested this with a regular water from the tap,
filtered water and distilled water,
they all worked very well
they had no noticeable impact on flavor
that I could discern.
A single spray is putting maybe 0.1 of a gram
onto the beans
not all of it is even gonna go in
with the beans into the grinder
so your contribution of water here is actually
really very minimal,
not something to worry about
but I'd still want it to taste clean
and be free of any in pleasantness
but yeah, regular filtered water is gonna be totally fine.
Now there's one more little hack you can do with these
it's kind of interesting that I wanna talk about
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So there's one last hack is an interesting one
and actually turned up on the decent forums,
there's a private forum for decent owners, decent being,
this Espresso machine right here.
Now someone on there had the idea of taking one of these
and spraying the puck with up to a gram of water
before pulling a shot,
a kind of pre pre-wet.
Which seems like a strange thing to do
but it had a couple of interesting impacts.
Firstly, if you sprayed the puck,
let it soak in,
when you added more water that water soaked in very quickly
in comparison to a dry puck.
So perhaps during the pre-wet you had a more effective
pre-wetting going on there.
Secondly, they saw increase in puck resistance
during the shot.
Now, puck resistance is an interesting measurement
that very few machines would really pay any attention to
but if your puck is easier than usual to get through
that's probably a bad thing indicating channeling
and having a puck that's a little bit harder to get through
indicates that you're more likely
having a more even flow through that puck.
So that was interesting
and that was definitely worth testing.
I'm not sure it's something
you'd wanna add to your routine every single day
but if you've got one of these lying around then yes
it's absolutely worth giving it a test.
And again, you might say aha but now
what about the water in the bottle,
surely now that has to matter.
So I did some tests and it turned out
the distilled water had the worst results.
These tests weren't conclusive
but the taste was the worst
and there was more channeling and issues in those shots
than there was with filtered normal water
and hard water from the tap.
Again, not a massive impact
and certainly not a large enough sample set to really
guarantee the results
but again, I wouldn't be spending
the money or time or effort
getting distilled water to put in one of these
when filtered water that you brew your coffee with
would probably be just fine.
So there it is, the little spray bottle
I would say a useful addition to your coffee kit
whether you're grinding for Espresso,
grinding for Filter grinding for both,
if you have a single dose grinder
it's probably helpful but
do you think about
whether it's gonna impact your workflow?
Whether some of the caveats that I mentioned before
will impact you.
Many people have been doing this for a long time
and if you're one of them,
I wanna hear from you down in the comments below.
Lemme know how you're getting on,
lemme know what you like or dislike about having this
as a part of your routine.
Is it now in essential for you?
Let me know down in the comments below
but for now I say thank you so much for watching
and I hope you have a great day.