Hi All, It's been a while. Living in New Zealand, I've been in lurk mode mostly, and have to pick my moments to read the list carefully, as I get very, very nostalgic for the days when I could pick my greens from that vast variety at SM and just drive down to their Oakland warehouse and pick them up. Nearly three years on, I'm still brewing vacpot coffee with a glass rod, mostly Vienna-roast organic Papua New Guinea ground coarse. I've found that the coarse grind is the secret to the roundness and sweetness that characterizes the best of this brewing method. And, as many of you may recall, it's grinding coarse that is counterintuitively a factor in difficult drawdowns. In three years, making coffee every day, I've experienced about 5 drawdown delays, all of them when I didn't get the burst of heat right. But I digress. I've been using a Vario grinder during this time, one of the early ones, serial number 18. I had it on a stepdown voltage converter, and, without knowing why, assumed that this would be bad for the grinder and that I was slowly killing it. A little over a week ago, it stopped. I emailed Kyle, apologizing for abusing his lovely Vario, and asked if it was reasonable to expect that a similar Vario properly built for 220 volts native would have done better. I love Vario, and had no reason to want a different grinder. His answer? There should be no reason at all why my grinder should feel abused through a stepdown converter, and I had every reason to expect my Vario to continue functioning properly. He then gave me a few diagnostics to try to pin down what was going on. A couple of email exchanges later, he asked for my address and said he was going to ship a replacement motor to me. I insisted that he at least let me pay the shipping, and he accepted. He added a new circuit board, the replacement display that saves its settings and a replacement drive belt. Basically, he sent along a complete update to the machine's internals! Shipped internationally on August 10, arrived at my door August 15! Following simple instructions, I pulled the grinder apart and put it back together again, completely refurbished, in about a half hour. Baratza's customer service is legendary. And with good reason. Thanks, Kyle! btw, the Vario grinds coarse-ground drip beautifully consistenly, and beats anything remotely close in its class, even the Mazzer Mini (which is supposed to be yet a class above). You can't beat the build qualtiy on the Mazzer, but it's what's in the cup that counts, and the Vario wins easily on that count. Doug Homeroast mailing list Homeroasthttp://lists.sweetmariascoffee.com/mailman/listinfo/homeroast_lists.sweetmariascoffee.comSweet Maria's Forum Our new Coffee Library |