When you’ve just purchased a new grinder there are a couple things you need to make sure of which for some reason is not mentioned in most reviews.
- First you need to season the burrs. This means putting at least a couple KGs of cheap oily beans through the grinder. I did 2 KGs on my DLC burrs before I noticed more consistency but will probably do another kilo. Different burrs need different amounts op seasoning it seems. The procedure here is simple: just keep on grinding on different settings and do it in 250gr batches to not overheat the grinder.
- Second. Make sure the burrs are aligned properly. Factory alignment might be ok-ish in most situations but you need to verify this yourself. The procedure here is a bit more finicky. You can follow Lance Hedrick’s tips in his burr alignment video. I was as lucky as he was: I only had to adjust it once (by adding two small pieces of foil in 1 layer), and test it twice before it was perfectly aligned.
After doing these steps I noticed way better consistency in my shots as well as dialing in was easier as well.
These tips are for most flat-burr grinders, but in this particular case it’s for the df83v. The df83v thusfar seems to be a great bang for your buck grinder and with a few minor tweaks you can make sure to get the best out of it. You could ask yourself the question why on earth you’d need to tweak an +800$ grinder, but I guess that comes with the espresso rabbit-hole.
By the way, after unboxing there was a weird chemical smell as well that disappeared after a couple days (I did nothing to fix this).