mine’s just about the same except i tend to push the grind size down as much as i can, up to the point it tips toward bitter. and that seems to depend significantly on the particular coffee itself, i expect both for flavor/roast reasons and for innate properties of the variety. i start around 20 on the encore and if thats tasting fine, go 2 clicks finer each time until it doesn’t, then back off by one. and it’s grind one or two clicks finer with an aged bag vs a fresh one.
I did this for about a year. Argument was the hot bloom could pull out some parts of flavor that the cold brewing couldn’t. I recently switched back to cold-only and decided the brews were improved. I do 100gm:700gm ratio and let it steep 24 hours.
fwiw, it sounds to me like your encore may have an issue. at 0 the burrs should start making interference noise and the grinder should be making espresso-range powder/dust.
i think you basically want some amount of agitation at some point relatively early in the process just to make sure all the grounds are getting wet. then you usually want less in the middle/late phases to avoid clogging as op mentioned, since the undisturbed bed slows/stops a percentage the fines from reaching the filter, and the reason you want to avoid clogging is that you cant get as good of a result if it winds up running too slow overall.
pouring technique can definitely have an effect on all this (e.g. pouring too hard in the middle to late phases with a shallow water level digs into the coffee bed and churns it up causing a lot of agitation).
im interested to check these out. that said i had some rather mediocre coffee when visiting their shop on division street so i didnt consider them to be brewing wizards
second-term presidents having expanded power seems scary. otherwise this all seems cool. any ideas about reforming lower federal judge appointments by the president?
yeah it seems this would only be about distribution below the setting since the upper bound should be somehow gated by the burr gap plus slop (runout, flex under dynamic grinding forces, etc).
i reasoned that slow feeding made more fines since it creates more opportunities for the beans to hang out in the breaker section of the burrs without pressure behind them driving them into the cutting surfaces.
the other great thing about the long steep is it cools off the coffee. overly hot coffee tastes worse.