simple solutions

In our house, we love coffee. We make at least two servings daily. Recently, we’d started to notice that our process was leaving quite a mess. It seemed like our grinder was suddenly incapable of depositing freshly ground beans into our filter without dust going everywhere!

This didn’t seem to be a problem in the past, so we started hypothesizing what could have changed. I’d started using a knife to get all of the beans out of catch (I wanted exactly 16.0g of fresh ground coffee!) and so that was suspect #1. However, if I didn’t use the knife (or a finger), a lot of coffee would stay in the catch.

We started thinking about possible solutions. We got creative too. What if we got an anti-static gun? We also looked into getting a new grinder (we still might get this - it looks amazing!).

Ultimately, though, we were rescued with the simplest solution! Just a few drops of water.

This turns out to be called the Ross Droplet Technique (RDT), which turns out to be an open secret in the “home barista community” (turns out there is a home barista community! - ah the beauty of the niches enabled by the internet!).

It was a good reminder that even though there are many roads that lead to Rome, sometimes, there’s a simple one - it just takes a little creativity.