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How we chose the best coffee grinders
We ground lots of coffee in each grinder, looking at the following:
We repeatedly ground medium roast coffee at settings for espresso, pour-over, and French press. We inspected the ground beans to see if they were even and suitable for whatever method we were aiming for.
We checked the consistency of any timers or cup settings. If something said it was grinding four cups of coffee for drip or pour-over, we expected it to produce something close to 32 grams of coffee (that would be the 1:16 coffee-to-water ratio we typically brew with).
We checked any other features of the grinders—portafilter cradles or micro adjustment rings for example—and finally brewed coffee using all three methods to taste the actual results of all that grinding.
The grounds from the Fellow Opus came out evenly and neatly.
Noah Kaufman
What to look for in a burr grinder
Here are a few key distinctions you’ll find between burr grinders and features you’re likely to see.
Different brews require different grind consistencies: You’ll want a fine grind for espresso, a medium grind for pour-over coffee, and a very coarse grind for French press and cold brew. Machines vary in the number of grind settings they offer, but generally speaking, the more settings, the better.
Some grinders, like the Eureka Mignon series, are called “stepless” grinders, which means they don’t have a fixed number of settings, and the adjustment wheel moves freely to make the smallest adjustments, like a dial on a high-end gas range. However, don’t be wooed by a machine offering 800 settings if you’re not actually going to use them all. Instead, think about the coffee-making methods you use most often and choose a machine that covers all of those grind consistencies. If you’re pulling espresso shots at home on the daily, you might want a coffee and espresso grinder with plenty of space on the fine-grinding end of the dial. If you enjoy an occasional espresso but also make your own cold brew, opt for a machine with a broader range, like the do-it-all Fellow Opus that has coarse and fine-grind settings. Don’t do espresso at all? You can get by with far fewer settings, like on the Fellow Ode or even a more budget option like Oxo’s entry-level grinder.
Most of the burr grinders we tested dose by time, allowing set how long the machine will grind for (unless you have a single dose option like a Fellow). Most under-$200 burr grinders operate on what’s essentially a fancier version of a windup timer, while slightly more expensive models like the Baratza Virtuoso+ use a digital timer to achieve split-second precision. These smart timers are helpful for honing your espresso craft, but if you’re working with a drip or pour-over, this feature isn’t as important. As long as you’re weighing the coffee beans and depositing them in the hopper per batch, the grinder will only eat up the amount of beans you feed it. Our advice: Unless you’re pulling espresso shots, in which case you’ll want to figure out exactly how long it takes to grind 18 grams of beans for a double shot, a digital timer isn’t essential, but you should still be weighing your beans with gram scale for the best tasting, consistent results.
At the most basic level, heavier grinders tend to be better grinders. The body, motor, and burrs tend to be higher quality and will last longer. Every heavy grinder isn’t a good one and every lightweight grinder shouldn’t get instantly dismissed, but it’s a reasonable place to start.
Other coffee grinders we tested and liked
Baratza Encore ESP
Baratza Encore ESP Coffee Grinder
We didn’t love the regular Baratza Encore when we tested it, but the ESP is a different story. The big advance of the ESP over the older Encore, and even over the higher-end Baratza Virtuoso+, is the addition of more micro adjustments on the finer end of the grind settings. Those smaller adjustments let you dial in your shots in an impressive way for a grinder that costs less than $200. The Encore ESP also improved the burr. It uses Baratza’s M2 burr, which is sharper and produced even coffee grounds across a range of settings. The catch cup of the ESP is also designed to easily transfer ground coffee into a portafilter, which can be a very messy business.
The only problem, if you want to call it that, with the ESP is that it has no way to measure a dose of coffee. Getting an exact weight of coffee is incredibly important for pulling good espresso shots. It’s not a huge problem. It’s possible to put single doses in the grinder like you do with the Fellow, thanks to the low grind retention. The Encore ESP consistently had output within .1 or .2 grams of what went in.
Oxo Burr Grinder with Built-in Scale
OXO Brew Conical Burr Coffee Grinder with Scale
This is the least expensive grinder we’ve seen that uses a built-in scale rather than a timer to measure how much coffee it’s grinding. That helps it produce the most accurate results of any grinder that isn’t single-dose. The grind is consistent, though it has fewer settings than many other grinders we tried. This is a good burr grinder that has held up well over time and the scale is a convenient feature, but given its higher price tag we think the Fellow Opus is a better bet.
KitchenAid Burr Grinder
With a price tag under $200, KitchenAid’s burr grinder is relatively affordable for everything it offers. It comes with 70 grind settings, which is plenty if you have a house that enjoys both espresso and French press. It uses a digital timer for its dosing and can also grind directly into a portafilter, making it the least expensive option we’ve found with both those features (the Breville Smart Grinder Pro has both, but is a bit more expensive). It’s durable—we’ve used it for years—and think it’s a good choice if you’re looking for a truly budget espresso grinder, but the evenness of the grind and quality of the materials is better on the Baratza Encore ESP.
Baratza Virtuoso+
Baratza Virtuoso+ Conical Burr Coffee Grinder
Baratza makes burr grinders that range in price from what we’d call very affordable (the Encore) to pro-level machines that can top $900. The Virtuoso+ is a step up from the brand’s entry-level machines, but that step is a sizable one. It uses a digital time dosing down to the tenth of a second, which we found to be very consistent. Using setting 18, which Baratza recommends for drip coffee, we repeatedly got exactly nine grams of coffee in four seconds. Your mileage may vary with different roast levels, but use that as a jumping-off point. It uses Baratza’s M2 burr, which gives a bit more precision than M3 burr in the Encore and makes this a better bet for brewing methods that need coffee ground at the extreme ends of the spectrum (Turkish, espresso, French press, or cold brew). We’d note though, that the Encore ESP also uses the M2 burr, and while it doesn’t have digital dosing, it is less expensive.
Eureka Mignon Filtro
Eureka Mignon Filtro Coffee Grinder
Eureka is an Italian coffee equipment company that specializes in high-quality (and often expensive) machines, most of which are well outside the price range we considered in these tests. And while the Mignon Filtro is Eureka’s most affordable model, it has the same sort of high quality construction you’d expect from a much more expensive grinder with features like 50-mm flat burrs. It’s simple and fully manual, but it features stepless adjustment. That means the burrs don’t lock into preset settings, but expand and contract freely, allowing for ultra-precise, fine-tuned control. That kind of versatility is a big plus, but the downside is that it’s impossible to tell how the grinder is set when you look at it for the first time. The adjustment dial is numbered 1-5, but it can make four rotations, so it takes patience and a willingness to do some trial and error. It’s also really only equipped to do middle-of-the-road grinds for methods like drip or pour-over. Despite its relatively low price it’s definitely a more advanced grinder.
Eureka Mignon Notte
Eureka Mignon Notte Grinder
The espresso-only entry from Eureka functions much like the Filtro, with manual operation and stepless grind adjustments. It’s designed to grind finer and only into a portafilter. The quality of the grind is wonderfully consistent and the Mignon Notte also features a burr adjustment that makes it easy to clean and reset the burrs. If you are OK without any automatic dosing you’ll like this grinder, we just think features like time dosing or single dosing (like Fellow does) are preferable options for most people.
Breville Smart Grinder Pro
Breville Smart Grinder Pro Coffee Mill
Breville’s Smart Grinder Pro, like many of its espresso makers, provides a quality product at a mid-level price. It uses conical burrs and offers 60 settings—plenty for all brewing methods—and both manual and automatic grind settings. The Smart Grinder Pro doses by time, and selecting a set number of cups correlates with a preset amount of grinding time. You’re going to need to tweak it, though, because while we got a suitable 9.8 grams of coffee on the 1-shot setting, we got 45 grams of coffee on the 2-cup setting, which is way too much. 45 grams of ground coffee is enough for four cups. The grinder is easy to adjust, produces a consistent grind, and allows for direct grinding into both a 54-mm and 58-mm portafilter, so if you’re willing to do some trial and error on the dosing, we think you’ll be happy with this one.
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Coffee grinders we don’t recommend
This is the least expensive burr grinder we tested (and may be the least expensive brand name burr grinder out there). Its performance is what we’d expect for something that costs 40 bucks. It can’t really grind fine enough for espresso, and the grind was a bit uneven on coarser settings. Instead of a timer, it comes with “cup” settings (grind 2 cups, or 4 cups, for example). But those settings seemed to be arbitrary. On the same coarseness setting, the 2-cup option yielded 12 grams of grounds, while the 4-cup option gave just 13 grams. For an extra $30 or $40, you can get something better than this.
The Aarke grinder is beautiful, as all Aarke equipment is. And it produces a terrifically consistent grind. If paired with the Aarke coffee maker, the grinder can automatically detect the amount of water and grind the right amount of coffee. Some longer-term testing, though, showed that this grinder has a tendency to jam up. And while it makes an aesthetically pleasing pair along with the companion coffee maker, we just don’t think that, on its own, this grinder warrants its high price tag.
The Wilfa Uniform grinder has a sleek, minimalist design appropriate for its Norwegian origins and tremendous versatility; it had no issue grinding fine enough for Turkish coffee, which takes a finer grind even than espresso. The 58-mm flat burrs produced perfect, consistent results and the whole machine has a high quality feel to it. However, it’s plagued with one very inconvenient design flaw: In order to adjust the grind setting, you need to turn the entire lid—and it’s quite a wide lid at nearly eight inches in diameter. It was very challenging to rotate. We also had some issues with flyaway coffee grounds when we removed the catch cup.
Technivorm is best known for its high-end Moccamaster drip coffee makers, but the company also makes a matching burr grinder. Like the Eureka models, it has 50-mm flat burrs, stepless grind adjustment, and manual operation via a button on its side. The issue we found with it was that it had poor grind retention compared to other grinders we tested. It held on to around 12% of the coffee we put in.
If you want an attractive grinder that doesn’t cost as much as Fellow’s, the Zwilling certainly has an aesthetics-forward design (and you can pair it with the Enfinigy drip coffee maker for a complete set). But the materials are lighter and a bit flimsier than they appear in a photo. We did like the coffee we made across all three brewing methods, but between the lighter materials and manual operation, we think you’d do better with either our budget pick from Oxo or, if you can swing the extra 90 bucks, the Fellow Opus.
The Sette 30 is one of Baratza’s espresso grinders, and we loved the look and design. Unfortunately, we had issues with performance. We had a lot of flyaway grinds when using a 54-mm portafilter, which is what you’ll find on most espresso machines under $1000, and the design couldn’t accommodate a large espresso dosing funnel like this one that would help avoid all that spillage. Using a 58-mm portafilter was better, but still a minor coffee storm on the counter. The Sette 270 was a great improvement on this front. If you have your heart set on the Sette 30 we’d insist on a low-profile dosing ring like this.
The Encore (not to be confused with the Encore ESP) is Baratza’s entry-level grinder and uses an M3 burr, which is a step down from the M2 burr found in the Virtuoso+ and Encore ESP. In our tests, the grind for French press was noticeably inconsistent, with too many fine particles slipping through. Even if you’re not planning to make espresso, we’d recommend spending the extra $50 to upgrade to the Encore ESP.
DeLonghi’s grinder will work fine for drip or French press brewing, but it falls short for espresso. It’s designed specifically for DeLonghi portafilters, which are slightly smaller than the standard 54-mm size used by Breville and many other mid-priced machines, so standard portafilters won’t fit. It also only grinds one shot at a time
We were pleasantly surprised at the evenness of the grind from this $60 grinder, but we weren’t happy with the dosing. You set the amount of coffee by cups (anywhere from 4-18), but the grinder produced wildly different weights of coffee on the same cup setting as we adjusted the grind setting from finer to coarser.
The Capresso was all over the place. The coarse grind wasn’t consistent, the medium grind was too fine, and the dosing system (presumably cups, but just labeled 1-12) didn’t seem to correlate to any actual measure of coffee.
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How to care for a coffee grinder
If this is your first time getting a good coffee grinder, the necessary upkeep might surprise you. It’s not incredibly labor-intensive, but you do need to keep it clean so it will continue to grind efficiently, consistently, and keep stale debris out of your brew.
The easiest thing to do is to run cleaning pellets through the grinder. If you’re only using it to brew a couple drinks for yourself in the morning, once a month should be enough. The pellets (I use Grindz) are food safe and help get any residual oil from coffee beans out as well as forcing out any pieces that got stuck in the burrs.
Urnex Grindz Professional Coffee Grinder Cleaning Tablets
If you grinder allows it, you should also remove the upper burr and brush it off. This typically involves removing the bean hopper and twisting out the burr. A cleaning brush typically comes with a grinder.
Finally, don’t forget to brush out the chute where the grounds come out. Coffee often clings to the sides, and if you don’t clear it out every couple of weeks, you’ll be surprised by how much old coffee builds up.
If you’re feeling more adventurous you can try recalibrating the burrs in your grinder, which will let you change how fine a grinder can go. This is a more involved operation that involves taking apart a lot more of the grinder. Here’s a good Reddit thread explaining how to recalibrate the burrs on a Fellow Opus.
What are the parts of a coffee grinder
There are two types of burr grinder: conical and flat. Conical grinders take a bit less power and generate less heat because their motors get some help from gravity. Flat burr grinders take more power and run hotter, but they can frequently produce a more consistent result.
Conical burr sets are made up of two pieces, a ring burr and a cone burr.
- Ring burr: The ring burr is the outer piece of a conical set and it’s the one that’s easiest to remove for cleaning. It helps feed beans through the grinder
- Cone burr: This is the inner piece of a conical burr set and it’s typically the size and shape of a tween’s thumb if that thumb was encircled with sharp ridges.
Flat burr grinders have matching top and bottom pieces that evenly crush beans between them.
This is the piece you turn to make a grind coarser or finer. It moves the burrs closer together or further apart.
Some grinders come with both a main adjustment wheel and a micro adjustment. This still moves the burrs closer together or further apart, just on a much more precise scale. For the Fellow Opus for example, one click on the main adjustment changes the grind by 50 microns; one click on the micro adjustment wheel moves just 16.7 microns.
This is where the beans in a grinder get stored. Typically they hold around 12 ounces of coffee beans and have only so-so seals, which is why we like single-dose grinders that encourage people to keep their beans sealed up and fresh in between uses.
This is where the beans go after they pass through the grinder. Some grinders, like the Baratza Encore, deposit the ground coffee into an attached chamber (kind of like a vending machine), from which you can shovel the grounds to use as you please. Others, like the Fellow Ode, deposit into a sleek, removable cup, making it easy to pour the grounds directly into a French press or pour-over filter.
If you have a grinder designed for espresso it probably has a cradle. This is the fork designed to hold an espresso machine’s portafilter, allowing you to grind straight into it so you don’t make a mess transferring grounds from a cup.
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