Forum: Zerno x Tala
A couple of years ago, I came across the Chicago-based brand Zerno, which was creating top-of-the-line, hand-built coffee grinders for home use. Coffee professionals and enthusiasts alike, were praising Zerno for its dedication to incredible precision and quality, and for engineering interesting features that promised to elevate flavors of coffee. After following them for a while, I sent a message to their team a few months ago intending just to voice my appreciation for their ingenuity and craftsmanship. In that exchange, they mentioned their desire to do more community events and offer a way to engage with customers and the greater coffee community that was experiential. We connected immediately over our passion for engaging our community—something we try to do at Tala in many ways—and an appreciation for excellence in the craft of coffee. It didn’t take long from there for us to get excited about two local businesses coming together over a shared desire. That’s how we began planning Forum, an event we held last Saturday at our roastery in partnership with Zerno.
What is Zerno?
Zerno is a company truly dedicated to excellence in form and funtion above everything. They designed an exciting and innovative grinder specifically for home enthusiasts obsessed with the craft. They design ultra-precision hand-built and hand-assembled grinders, built to high tolerances with features that allow coffee to reach its peak potential. Check out their incredible work here.
forum event
For our first Forum event, we started with a time of general connection and mingling with complimentary donuts and raffle prize entries before launching into a group cupping. We had all of our single-origin coffees on the cupping table, and each coffee had one side ground by one grinder, and one by the other. The grinders that Zerno brought were the same in every respect except their augers—they brought one faster-feed rate auger and one slower-feed rate auger. We got to taste the difference between each for every coffee of ours, getting to experience the impact on flavors of just this one powerful variable.
The auger is one of the most innovative aspects of Zerno’s grinder. Many grinders on the market are designed with augers that help move the beans from the hopper into the burrs, but the auger in Zerno’s design is also a pre-breaker, meaning that it begins breaking the coffee beans before they even get to the burrs. This allows the burrs to grind more effectively and efficiently and—most importantly—evenly. They have two kinds of augers which control the rate at which the beans enter the burrs. Different feed rates will give different grind consistencies, or particle distribution sizes. For example, the slower the feed, the fewer fines are produced by the grinding process. Fewer fines result in more clarity in your brewed coffee, and less body. Depending on your preference, you would opt for a slow or fast auger to achieve your perfect cup of coffee. To learn more about Zerno’s Variable Feed Rate Prebreaker, check out their website.
Getting to co-host this event was so much fun. It was a wide range of people who showed up—many had come as Zerno fans and had never been to Tala before, others had come because they love Tala but had never heard of Zerno. It was also fun to see a spread of people who were incredibly nerdy and had tons of background in coffee knowledge, and some who had limited experience with cupping or tasting coffee.
Zerno builds every grinder by hand to order, so customers wait many months to receive their precision grinders. Several folks at the event had already placed their order but had never interacted with a Zerno grinder first-hand. It was so fun watching those people get even more excited about when their grinder was ready for them.
It isn’t every day that you find people who give so much attention to detail in their craft, and the guys at Zerno are the most meticulous I’ve seen. Hosting an event that allowed people the opportunity to ask the designers and engineers about their craft was so much fun. We find that above anything, the chance to ask questions and get to know the people behind the incredible work is what draws and excites the community. Zerno is a very big name in the industry, but having such an accessible time to engage with their team and their product was really awesome.
We definitely plan to do more Forum events in the future, so make sure you keep an eye out on our events calendar and hop on our newsletter so you don’t miss the next opportunity for something like this.
Keith Lilja
Keith is one of the owners of Tala, and is head of roasting and graphic design here. Keith laughs easily and often, and remembers almost every name. Coffee has been a long-time passion which he fanned into flame in college and has kept roaring ever since.