I’m writing this at Fourth Wall in New Orleans, a coffee shop I discovered a couple of years ago on a college spring break trip with my friend Stuart. I’m out here now on a Sunday afternoon after driving 45 minutes into the city from Slidell, LA, where my accommodations are for a work trip to Stennis Space Center. Its unassuming facade amidst the parking structures and hotel high rises in this part of town opens into a cool, low-light bar with cluster of plants and oddities strewn about. It has lots of alternative seating: vintage wooden school desks, patio furniture, and scruffy armchairs. And behind the counter, squeezed between bottles of syrup, alternative milks, and the espresso machine itself, is a Mahlkonig EK43.
When looking for new coffee shops to spend time at, the first thing I do is swipe through all photos on the Google Reviews card for evidence of an EK43. I have yet to find a more reliable indicator that a coffee shop serves good drinks. Not to say that an EK43 is a prerequisite to brewing delicious coffee, just that there is a strong correlation between this grinder and drip coffee that tastes 7/10 or better (to my palate).
In researching this correlation, I found this blog post from Matt Perger, an Australian barista who claims to have popularized this grinder by stunning the judges at the 2011 World Brewer’s Cup, though he credits specialty coffee giant Scott Rao with introducing him to the grinder at his cafe earlier that year. This makes sense: those who bought this grinder for their cafes following the 2011 World Brewers Cup would of course be doing so to help make their coffee that good. Of course cafes with EK43s should be expected to have good drinks. This is the grinder that one purchases to chase excellent cups of coffee.
The design is so iconic it inspired a series of sketches and ideas for a grinder of my own. Maybe I’ll pull this off one day. Focus is on big simple geometric forms, and I really like this idea of the machine being centered around a large disk of stone that acts as an inertia wheel to store kinetic energy.
