OK...
I use a conical burr grinder I can single-dose, it is the
Lelit Fred PL-44. I do not like storing beans in my grinder. It gets cleaned monthly using Urnex Grindz and then opening it up and using some tools and compressed air to clear out any retention that is still up in the mechanism.
Usually about 3 weeks in is when I start to see clumping, minor, but still present.
Today, I pulled out one of my Cocktail Atomizers and filled it with the same water I brew with, RO water from a local water treatment company who I have used in the past for water treatment, and who also maintains a water counter at a local market for filling up jugs with RO water.
My usual espresso routine is a 20g dose. I aim for 14g out in 30 seconds.
I weighed my beans as usual, then using the lid of my hopper, I spread them out. The hopper lid allows all 20g to spread in a single layer without piling or leaving much in the way of holes where I was wasting the spray. I transferred them back to the ramekin I use to weigh them, covered with my hand and shook them about for a moment. I also checked weight, and the 3 spritzes routinely showed a .1g increase in weight.
Immediately I transferred to the grinder and proceeded as usual.
Yesterday, per my experience, I saw some minor clumping. That seemed to be ameliorated today after spritzing each dose.
Something else I noted is that my third of four shots seemed to also cause a breakdown in some of the retention inside the grinder as I noted an additional 2g out of the grinder on that run.
I cannot answer whether this method made grinding "neater" or less messy, partly because that one round of grinding expressed some additional grind and I had a bit of a mess everywhere after grooming and tamping that dose.
As for shot quality, I cannot give an adequate response... I do not have tools like a refractometer to check extraction or anything like that. Subjectively, today was a good day for espresso. Shots were nice, tasted perhaps better than average, and maybe I had a bit more crema in my shots.
Anybody making espresso on a daily basis knows that every day can be an adventure.
Weather has a role in this. But this has been a consistently damp and humid week here in NorCal, so frankly, even though it was raining this morning, it was not different today than it was for the past 3-5 days.
I will continue the experiment. I don't relish adding the extra step. I don't deny the ritual aspect to coffee and our daily habit, but agree with the earlier post that some of this goes way overboard.
I am not concerned about ruining the burrs. They are still exposed to humidity in the environment, and the meager amount being added through some spritzing is not enough to do them damage, imo. Keep in mind, the burrs are usually coated to protect them from the acid and oils of the beans. Would a wisp of additional moisture somehow be enough to suddenly change that?
