this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
71 points (96.1% liked)

Coffee

8424 readers
1 users here now

☕ - The hot beverage that powers the world!

Coffee gadgets - It's always great to learn about new gadgets. Please share your favorite hardware or full setups. It might inspire newcomers to experiment!

Local businesses - Please promote your local businesses. If you are not the owner of the business you are promoting, kindly ask the owner if it's okay. It would be great if the business has a physical store to include an exterior or interior shot.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I mainly want to get a coffee grinder because beans have a longer shelf life and are cheaper. If I also get better coffee, that's a bonus! (Basically, I'm not looking for a premium option)

What is something I should pay attention to when buying a grinder. I see people mention "flat burr" grinders all the time. Is that something important?

A few years ago I bought a cheap terrible manual coffee grinder off Amazon. It took 5-10mins to grind my coffee. The grounds where too course and my hands hurt. Is the experience better with higher quality manual grinders? At the moment, I'm not a huge fan of manual grinders because of this experience and am leaning towards buying an electrical one.

What makes a coffee grinder better than others? What is the difference between premium and budget options?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Depends on what you're looking for. Do you want drip? Espresso? French press? Manual ? Electric? What's your budget?

For cheap/low quality electric grinders, most of them are blade grinders: they chop up the beans in very rough sizes, take forever, sound like they're gonna explode and make terrible coffee. Don't bother, they're shit.

Burr grinders come in 2 main "cutting technologies", conical and flat. Conicals are mostly found on manual grinders, entry level electrics and some medium to high end ones. Flats are much more common on the medium to high end range because they tend to need much more torque and therefore powerful motors. As for the differences between the topologies, it mostly comes down to particle size distribution and the effects it has. Conicals tend to emphasize texture (think thick, syrupy espresso), flats tend to emphasize clarity (flavors tend to be more easily to discern). But they exist in a continuum and burr shape alone is definitely not the only factor.

As for actual recommendations, take a look at James Hoffman's and Lance Hedrick's channels on youtube, they have a lot of incredible advice on all kinds of grinders, among other coffee equipment. Be warned though, it's a very deep rabbit hole :D

My main grinder is a DF64/G-Iota (~400€), and is an absolute workhorse. It's a mid-range grinder that can be very easily modded to rival grinders more than twice its price, takes standard 64mm flat burrs and can be upgraded with super expensive SSP burrs. I love it. I think the current generation corrected many flaws I had to mod out of mine.

My travel grinder is a conical manual 1-ZPresso J-Max (~150€) that's so quick it can grind at espresso range at almost 1g/s, with excellent results.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Thank you for explaining. This is exactly what I was struggling to understand with coffee grinders. They appear to do the same and massively vary in price but now it makes some sense.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Also, for the price, you gain a lot of fit and finish and sometimes features, convenience and/or workflow improvements. Good midrange products should focus exclusively on grind quality, even if it means lack of features or a rougher workflow.