Few things are as good as the smell of someone else mowing their lawn or of grinding great coffee in the morning, the benefit of the coffee is that if you have a good grinder you get that intoxicating smell all year round!
It’s hard to talk about this grinder without sounding awestruck, even as coffee professionals, but remember we don’t stock most generic brew kit. The brewers, equipment, and grinders we stock are a direct result of our blanket three-prong review approach.
- Performance
- Ease-of-use
- Durability
Performance
Let’s talk about why it grinds better than any other sub-£2500 grinder. We need to establish what makes a high-performance grinder, essentially it is a measure of how ‘precise’ the grind is. By this, we mean, ‘are all the ground pieces of coffee the same size’? Without getting too technical, we want to know what percentage of the ground coffee is categorised as ‘fines’ or ‘boulders’. High-quality ‘flat’, stainless steel burrs are usually only found in commercial grinders but – you guessed it – this grinder has them!
You might be thinking, ‘Why do I need a precise grind’? Great question.
Even more important than having your coffee ground the right coarseness, is having all the coffee ground the same size. Finely ground coffee brews and extracts faster than coarsely ground coffee.
Too coarsely ground coffee will extract too quickly and taste acidic (under-extracted).
Too finely ground coffee will extract too slow and taste bitter (over-extracted).
So, if you have some coarsely ground and some finely ground coffee, your coffee will taste both bitter and acidic. We recommend not trying this at home.
The goal of a great grinder is to lessen this effect and grind as precisely as possible. This is that grinder.
Ease-of-use
Let’s talk about why it’s so easy to use. To say we’re not completely awake at 5:30 am, trying to make a coffee, would perhaps be more misleading than a politician up for election. In all honestly, we’re barely conscious.
We drop things. We drop things like the coffee ‘collection bin’, which in this case only results in a broken toe. The minimalist collection bin is made from thick, anti-static stainless steel with a hardened, moulded lid. It’s not one with plastic hinges, there’s no way to break it (we’re being told by our fictional lawyer that we should add ‘under usual conditions, temperatures, by humans on planet Earth’).
Have you ever used a grinder with lightly roasted coffee and had ‘chaff’ (a papery layer wrapped around each coffee bean) slowly take over your kitchen counter? The anti-static steel bin here doesn’t completely negate this but it does a fine job at solving 95% of the mess.
You can’t press the wrong button. There’s only one. It turns off after its ground all the coffee you’ve put in the hopper. Effortless, even if you’ve temporarily dozed off.
The lid of the grinder is a set of scales. Why is this not the norm? They’re simple, effective and on-par with a £50-80 set of coffee scales. Also, if you’re awake-enough and that-way-inclined, the scales pair to a well-built phone app which has the most effortless Bluetooth connection we’ve ever experienced in anything.
However, forget all that, focus on the fact that you’ve got a world-class grinder that you can use for everything from your morning cafetière, to your mid-afternoon pour-over, to your after-dinner espresso – all while barely conscious.
Durability
On a personal note, my kitchen is on the ground floor and I brew my coffee in my kitchen. But, leaving the glass-topped scales aside, I’m convinced that if I went upstairs and threw it out the 2nd storey window, walked back downstairs, walked outside, picked up the grinder, walked back inside and plugged it back in – I think I could make myself a great coffee. Don’t try this, there are innocent people outside on the pavement living their best life.
When we set out to decide on the grinder we’d use for the rest of our lives, this was it.