Bought a $200 hand grinder thinking it would fix my coffee, it did not
When I got into pour over about 4 years ago I was using a cheap blade grinder and my cups tasted muddy and bitter all the time. So I read some stuff online and decided the answer was a hand grinder, dropped $200 on one, and told myself this was the last coffee money I'd spend for a while. Turns out the grinder was fine, the real problem was that I was brewing with water straight off a rolling boil and my beans were 3 months old from a grocery shelf. I kept grinding finer and finer chasing a better cup, which just made everything slower and more sour, and I burned through half a bag of decent beans before I figured it out. What actually fixed my coffee was a $12 kettle thermometer and buying beans from a local roaster here in Boise that prints the roast date on the bag. So yeah, the grinder still works great, but I could have saved myself $200 and a lot of bad mornings if I'd fixed the cheap stuff first. Has anyone else bought gear to solve a problem that turned out to be something dumb like water temp or stale beans?