Baratza Encore grind is off
Instead of the red tabs lining up which indicates you put the grinder in correctly, they were on opposite sides of each other. The misaligned grinder was causing the my grinds to be completely off. So instead of a grind size of 20, I was producing a grind of 40.
This weekend I got a bag of coffee from S.K. Coffee on Lyndale, my current best coffee in Minneapolis. The barista working the counter told me the bag I picked was a new brew that was an "absolute banger". I've never had coffee described as a banger, so I was excited to try the coffee when I got home.
I'm grinding with a Baratza Encore and doing pour over with an eight cup Chemex. With every new bag of coffee that I haven't ground before, I will start my grounds at the 20 mark which turns out a medium grind. However, when I ground the grounds for this coffee the grinds came out looking like they were at a 40, the largest grind size for the Baratza, instead of the medium 20. I had no idea why this happened, I assumed it had something to do with the last batch of cold brew I ground(?). For cold brew I use the largest grind size of 40, so maybe there were just left over grounds in the machine? That seemed like a good excuse but doesn't make any sense at all.
After two more pours with this messed up grind coming out, I opened up the lid and saw I ended up putting the burr grinder part in backwards after the last time I cleaned the machine. Instead of the red tabs lining up which indicates you put the grinder in correctly, they were on opposite sides of each other. The misaligned grinder was causing the my grinds to be completely off. So instead of a grind size of 20, I was producing a grind of 40.
This morning I flipped the grinder around so the red tabs lined up. As expected, the medium grind setting produced the expected grind size and that barista was right, the coffee is an absolute banger. Such a banger, that even with that large grind setting and a Chemex pour through time of 3 minutes, that coffee still turned out to be pretty decent. It wasn't good by pour over standards, but still decent which I think speaks a lot to that coffee.
If you end up with your grounds coming out to not match the grind setting, check the grinder to make sure you put it back together correctly.