How did I come to this? I used to be kind of meh on the whole WDT thing.
Lemme explain. I felt we espresso fanatics should always be demanding more of grinders: demand grinders that provided a fluffy, uncompacted output. Grinders that made the whole WDT thing unnecessary.
But the thing is, my reasoning behind this also justifies WDT – the Weiss Distribution Method – first developed in the alt.coffee / home barista / coffeegeek forums era nearly 2 decades ago. Its purpose was to overcome grinder deficiencies, namely compacted, clumpy, badly distributed grinds in a portafilter basket. And still to this day, many grinders that otherwise can do an excellent job at grinding coffee down to specific particle sizes struggle with delivering those grinds evenly, uncompacted, and “fluffy” to a filter basket. So my dream of expecting grinders to fix themselves has not come to pass.
So now I’m all about the WDT. It definitely aids your coffee prep, but I’ve always had concerns about the length of time home baristas spend on the technique. Because the longer you take to get that ground coffee into the portafilter with pressurised water running through it, the more you are making that coffee go stale. It’s all about the coffee’s stored CO2.
See, not everything in coffee is water soluble. In fact, many of the things that contribute to taste, flavour and aroma are insoluble and water alone won’t transport those to the cup. But other elements besides H20 are at play in roasted, ground coffee that can act as boxcars, transportation devices for these fats, lipids and oils.
One major one is carbon dioxide, or CO2. Freshly roasted coffee produces so much of that stuff, that litres of it (gas occupies a big space when uncompressed!) will evacuate over 5 to 10 days. The whole bean does a good job of containing CO2, but the moment you grind coffee, you create umpteen thousands more surface areas in the coffee for the gas to escape. And the finer your grind, the more surface areas you create.
Andrea Illy, in his thesis-cum-book Espresso: The Science of Quality, posited that coffee ground for espresso can lose up to 80% of its stored C02 in the first 2 minutes. For the pursuit of the best possible espresso, that’s… a very short time to play around with ground coffee. We want that C02 in coffee, which is why it’s really important to be pulling your shot of espresso within 30 seconds of the coffee being ground.
Getting all fancy with distribution, dosing, levelling, WDTing, tamping, etc before a shot doesn’t help on timing. I’ve seen professional baristas – competition level baristas – take up to 3 minutes in prep. It hurts.
So if a tool comes along that can do an excellent job of WDT, but only take a few seconds to do what a manual hand and a needle tool will take 45-60 seconds to do, I’m all for it, no matter how crazy the device looks.
Which brings us to… the claw!
The MHW-3Bomber Yu Cyclone WDT Tool
I call it The Claw. MHW-3Bomber calls it the Yu Series Cyclone WDT Tool, an $80 automated distribution device.
Designed only for 58mm portafilters and baskets, the Cyclone can apply a very decent WDT distribution to a bed of coffee in under 5 seconds. And the device gives some customization options. Though this is not a formal review, let’s get into it a bit.
The Yu Cyclone is a plunger style, spinning WDT tool with 14 needles installed in a seemingly random pattern. This is not a spirographic spinning tool, like the Weber Moonraker (which is a copy of various spirographic 3D printed tools found on Etsy for a few years now). In the Yu Cyclone, the individual needles’ circular tracks do not change diameter or pattern while the device is spinning.
Is it a big deal that the needles’ paths are circular and fixed, and not spirographic? There’s been some debate online as to whether or not spirographic movements of the needles in an automated WDT device are beneficial or detrimental. I haven’t been able to personally test one, so I cannot speak on that myself.
In the Yu Cyclone, the placement of the needles and each circular track they follow do a good job of covering the entire surface area (except directly in the middle) of the bed of coffee. The needles are .25mm, and in the box, six spare needles are included. I will say replacing the needles isn’t easy, based on a YT video MHW-3Bomber themselves put out, so try not to break them. Half of the needles have to be jammed up into the needle holders (the ones that have the metal ring above them); the other half can be dropped down from above into their holders, but still need to be forced into place with the help of pliers or some heavy flat tip tool.
The depth of all the needles is very easy to change, but you cannot set the depth of individual needles. When you do change the depth, be careful about not setting the depth too long so it scrapes the bottom of your filter basket.. I like this feature because I can easily adjust the Yu Cyclone to work with a 22g VST triple basket, or a 17g Rancilio double basket. It will even work with single shot baskets, if you adjust the depth to be very shallow.
The adjustment is achieved by unscrewing the two bolts at the base of the piston, then while holding them, screwing the main piston clockwise to lower the needles’ overall depth, or counter clockwise to reduce the overall depth. Once at the needle height you want, re-tighten the two black bolts at the base of the piston.
Looking at the design of the device, it almost appears that half the needles have an adjustment barrel up top – the metal rings around seven of the needle placements – but they don’t serve any adjustment function at all. I am speculating here, but based on the design of the device, which works via gravity to drop the needle assembly down into the bed of coffee, these purely serve as weights to make sure the assembly drops down.
The device features a lot of magnets and adheres very confidently to any 58mm filter basket. The magnets are powerful enough to pick up a filter basket filled with coffee (though not powerful enough to pick up a portafilter with the filter basket). It feels very solid and reassuring when you use it: it always seems to “lock into place”.
Depending on how fast and firm you press the plunger, you can get almost no WDT effect, or so much that you end up spinning a lot of the coffee to the outer edges of your filter basket. It’ll take a few tries to get a ‘feel” for it, but what works best for me is a measured, confident press on the plunger, not too forceful, 3 times to get a good distribution. Here’s a look at how it works.
The real star here is how the Cyclone does a really good job of WDT that is consistent, shot after shot after shot, achieving it in about 5 seconds or less. The workflow contribution here is immense: first, you get a very fast and even distribution, and you can hit the magic mark of 30 seconds, grinder to espresso machine, getting a full WDT application in the process. Grind your coffee; knock down the grounds; apply the Yu Cyclone for 5 seconds. Tamp your coffee, another 5 seconds, lock the portafilter into the machine, and under 30 seconds after the grinding ends, you’re pulling a shot. Sometimes as fast as 22 seconds in my own speed testing.
Should You Buy One
I’m on the fence given the price of the MHW-3Bomber Yu Series Cyclone WDT Tool (which is available on Amazon). It is $80 and that money goes into a lot of fine tuned and crafted metal and silicone parts. It definitely looks worth $80; perhaps even $100, $125, for the materials and construction quality. I don’t see this device breaking down, as long as you don’t try plunging it directly on a counter (the needles will bend and possibly break if you do so).
But the real question is, Is $80 worth spending to get your bed of coffee better distributed? Especially when you can get great WDT handheld devices for $20 or less? Or better yet, just demand that your grinder manufacturer designs a good grinder that produces a fluffy, even output that won’t see much benefit from applying a WDT distribution. They do exist (The Baratza Sette 270, the Rancilio Stile, to name two). Unfortunately, most espresso-primary grinders don’t do this. So we WDT.
Considering a really high quality, hand crafted 58mm tamper can cost $50 to $100, the cost of the Yu Cyclone is somewhat justified. Also considering this device will give you a very consistent and repeatable WDT distribution every time you use it, makes the price even more justified.
But perhaps the best justification for this device is the time saved to your espresso prep workflow. With it, you don’t have to fiddle around for a minute or longer, hand massaging the bed of coffee with a manual WDT device. 5 seconds and you’re done. That retains more CO2 in the coffee, and contributes to better crema, and a better tasting cup.
In that regard, if you’re a serious espresso nerd, the $80 cost of the Yu Cyclone from MHW-3Bomber may be very much worth the expense.
