u/Wooden-Membership-59

Like probably everyone here, I used to dial in new bags by vibes: pull a shot, wince, nudge the grinder, repeat. 5–15 shots per bag, and by the next bag from the same roaster I'd forgotten everything and started over.

Two changes fixed it for me and I want to share them because they're free and they work regardless of gear:

1. Bracket, don't creep. Fix your dose (18g) and target (36g out, 1:2). Shot 1 tells you which side you're on: sour = finer, bitter = coarser. Then make a decisive grind change — big enough to land on the other side of good. Shot 3 splits the difference. Timid single-step adjustments are why dialling in takes fifteen shots.
2. Write everything down, per bean. Not in your head, not "I think it was around 2.4." Dose, yield, time, grind, and one line about taste. The magic isn't the logging, it's the recall: next bag from the same roaster, you start one adjustment from dialled instead of starting from zero.

Disclosure: self-promo below. I did this in Apple Notes for a year and it was miserable to search, so I built a small web app for myself: it pins your best-rated shot per bean as your dial-in, pre-fills your last settings when you log, and charts drift as the bag ages. It's at pullshot.vercel.app, free to try on your current bag. Built nights/weekends — happy to answer questions about the method or the tool