We currently use Kafka 0.8.2 for our brokers. We use the .Poll() method to grab messages and commit after we collect 1000 messages. We are able to consume from the cluster fine using this library, and I can see that the offsets are being stored in the __consumer_offsets topic from a manual commit call. However, when the consumer restarts, it does not use the stored offsets. It instead restarts from the earliest offsets (I have auto.offset.reset=earliest). Do I need to do something specific to force Kafka to use these offsets instead of looking in Zookeeper, or should the consumer take care of that? Is there a way I can force the consumer to write offsets to Zookeeper instead of the __consumer_offsets topic?