Chasing retention I could not actually taste

I weighed in and weighed out carefully for a fortnight and established that the grinder was holding somewhere between three and four grams, and that the amount varied with how fine I was going.

Then I spent three weeks on bellows, taps, and a single-dose routine that added about ninety seconds to every morning. The retained grounds came down to roughly a gram.

The cups were not noticeably better. The only real gain was that doses became predictable, which matters when you are trying to change one variable at a time and the machine is quietly changing another.