Hey Kidz, make your Mazzer dose like an Anfim and achieve World Peace!

People rave about how KLEEN the Anfim doses. They talk about how much less waste they have at the end of a shift, and how the cleanliness enhances their barista experience. Some baristas feel we are closer to achieving World Peace because of the Anfim doser!

Well, if you have a little spare time you can make your Mazzer dose "almost like an Anfim."

Take an index card, or a manila file folder. Cut out a rectangular piece measuring about 1.5" x 5" (4cm x 13cm for you metric types). Roll it into a cylinder, and test fit it into the outlet hole of your Mazzer doser so that it's as tight a fit as possible. Actually, since the outlet hole is a little bigger on the inside than it is at the bottom, it helps to remove the upper star mechanism and fit the tube from the top (removing the guts of the mechanism is a good thing to do anyway, for cleaning purposes).

When you get the fit nice and snug, tape the cylinder to size with a piece of masking tape and then wedge it in there with about 1/2" sticking out the bottom of the doser, sort of like a little snout.

If you get this little tube to fit correctly, it'll stay put through a whole shift and help eliminate that famous Mazzer "leftward heave." This could save a lot of coffee in the course of a day. Of course, nothing is free: it does take a $.01 index card, a piece of masking tape, and 15 minutes.

By the way, in Italy the baristi call this little snout a "shnozz," although the correct term in technical Italian is "shnozzola."

If you're adventurous enough to try that one, there are a couple more things you could do to make your grinder more "Anfim-like."

The next two modifications are designed to "declump" your espresso grounds; declumped grounds extract more evenly, helping to eliminate channeling and related problems.

Go the the hardware store and buy a piece of 0.020" (0.5mm) diameter music wire. Cut a piece about 2.5" (65mm) long. Carefully wedge it between your doser's clear plastic window and the back wall so that it crosses the port coming from the grinding chamber. This will help to break up clumps and make your grounds fluffier. In this picture, you can see I've already removed the damn automatic doser microswitch, which no self-respecting 3W barista has a use for anyway.

The last tweak is strictly for the terminally insane, aka "me." You can make a shnozzola as described above, and equip it with music wire whiskers that automatically sift the grounds as you dose! My mom taught me always to sift the flour when baking a cake, and she knew what she was talking about, believe me.

Using the same 0.020" music wire, tape two or three u-shaped whiskers to the top of the shnozz (I used three, but two might have worked better). Then insert the shnozz as high as possible so that the doser vanes nearly brush the whiskers as you work the doser lever. Clumps will be busted apart as you dose. I swear, it's almost as good as a remote starter on a zero degree day!

Let me know if any of these things work for you. The idea is to make righteously good pours fun and easy!