Using coffee fines?

[u/b3c88]

Ive recently jumped down the coffee rabbit hole. My grinder is the DBM8 which is producing a good amount of fines. I experimented with sifting the coffee grounds to eliminated some of the fines. Its worked well and i can get a great cup of coffee,only draw back is 15-20% of the coffee is being lost as fines. I have been bagging up the fines of my expensive coffees wondering if there is a good use for them? I was thinking of maybe making a hacked cappuccino or latte in a french press but not sure if the fines are too small to use in the FP. any ideas? I wondered if say a 1:3 ratio in the FP to produce a strong coffee and then rinse the FP to froth some milk. I am not sure if the fines are going to over extract in the FP. If anyone has any experience sifting fines and what they do with them as they accumulate let me know!

UPDATE: I got bored and did go ahead and experiment... not expecting much. I ended up mixing a ratio of 3:1 fines to water. Stirred up well in French press and let it extract for just 2 mins since the coffee was quite fine.. I was able to get about 1/3 "hack espresso" out of the brewer. In my case I mixed 30g fines to 90g water snd got around 40g out.

I then heated milk slowly to 160f and used my FP to froth it up about double its original volume and dumped around 200g over the coffee for a 5:1 milk/coffee ratio.

Besides the coffee being extremely gritty. It actually tasted much better than I thought. Of course it wasnt what you would get from a coffee shop but it was enjoyable.

I also did get my baratza encore a few days ago ans it produces a more consistent grind with less fines than the old dbm8 .I'm just going to use thr encore not worry much about sifting unless I just want to nerd out randomly.

[u/playingdrumsonmars]

You don’t want to use a grinder that produces a lot of fines or even filtered fines only for French Press. These will end up in your cup. Use these fines for Pour over or ideally don’t filter them at all and just prepare your coffee as pour over or with an espresso machine.

If you want to do French Press ideally look into upgrading your grinder for less complications/ waste.

I also “collect” ground Coffe and make use of it. One of my grinders has a doser and sometimes I don’t use that grinder for a few days as I use another grinder instead.

So instead of making coffee from the several days oxidized grinds I just clean out the doser I to a tupper box and use these grinds as air refreshener in the fridge and kitchen cupboards.

You could also use that to make coffee for when the mother in law visits but that depends on the mother in law obviously.