Replace your grinder burrs and your water filter about every six months, and stagger them so you are doing one of the two every three months. Volume is what wears both of them out rather than the calendar, so a bar pulling four hundred drinks a day arrives sooner than one pulling eighty. Six months is still the number I give most cafes, because it lands close enough to right and because the honest interval is measured in a figure your bar is not keeping.
Both parts are expensive. Neither one announces itself on the way out. That combination is what makes them worth a calendar entry instead of a decision.
Why give a time interval when volume is the real variable?
Because a usage figure only helps somebody who is recording usage, and recording pounds through a grinder is not a thing the bars I work with actually do. The manufacturers and the researchers are right that throughput is the variable. Barista Hustle publishes per-model throughput figures for common commercial grinders, worked out against measured extraction rather than a warranty card, and if you are willing to keep a running total of what you have ground, go and use theirs. That is their work and it is better than a guess.
What I can tell you is what a cafe will actually execute. Six months holds up for most shops at ordinary volume. If you are busier than ordinary, halve it and stop reading.
Why won't a worn burr or a spent filter tell you it is finished?
There is no alarm on either one. A filter does not leak when its capacity runs out, it just stops doing the job while the water keeps arriving. Burrs go dull across months rather than overnight, and the grind setting that used to be correct simply stops being correct.
The part that costs money is the lag. By the time the drink is wrong enough that somebody says so, whatever caused it has been in the cup for weeks, and it was never on anybody's list because it was never a task. We have written separately about what moves underneath a fixed recipe while the bar is doing everything right, and burrs and water are two of the four things on that list.
How often should a cafe change the water filter?
The same six months as a working default, for the same reason, with one advantage: your filter cartridge is rated in gallons by whoever made it, and that number is printed on the cartridge or in its spec sheet. Look it up once, divide it by roughly what you use in a week, and you will have a real date instead of an approximate one. Your incoming water decides the rest, and what is in it before it reaches the machine is worth knowing whichever interval you land on.
Is changing the filter the same as descaling?
No, and treating them as one job is how a bar ends up doing neither properly. A filter works on water before it enters the machine. Descaling deals with mineral that is already inside it, and it runs on an interval your water hardness sets rather than one the calendar sets. We have written that one up on its own, including how to find your own hardness number and what it does to the schedule. Three separate jobs, three separate dates.
What does this look like on a real bar?
Put both on the calendar and offset them. Burrs in March and September, filter in June and December, or whichever pairing fits the year you have. You are doing something every quarter, the bill lands in two pieces instead of one, and neither part is ever badly overdue.
Then write the dates somewhere that is not a person. The date you changed the burrs belongs next to the grinder, the same way a drink recipe belongs above the machine rather than in a manager's memory. Staff turn over. A label does not.
Do we do this for your account?
Not as a standing arrangement, and I would rather say so here than let you find out in month four. We install brewers and we will service equipment when an account asks us to, arranged case by case, but it is not bundled into a wholesale account and it is not a maintenance contract. We also do not hand accounts a printed service schedule. This article is the closest thing we publish to one, which is exactly why it is published rather than filed.
The thing I would push back on is the order people usually run these in. A cafe with drifting drinks tends to look at the espresso machine first, because it is the expensive object in the room. It is almost always the two consumables that never got assigned to anyone.
If you want the coffee to stop being the variable while you sort the rest out: ASCENT is the blend we keep on bars precisely because we hold it steady, and we roast it to order every Wednesday in Pensacola. If you would rather start with a conversation than a bag, tell us your volume and the thing that is not working.
