Best coffee grinder: manual and electric bean grinders for your home
Not all coffee grinders are made equal. And while the best thing about freshly ground beans is indeed the freshness, there’s a lot of variation in the quality of grind - and that has a big impact on the taste of your brew.
The market is flooded with a plethora of different machines from the cheap to the eye-watering, and deciding which one to go for is no easy task. When you break it down, it gets a little less complicated.
What are the differnt types of coffee grinders?
There are in essence three different categories of coffee grinder to choose from: electric blade grinders, electric burr grinders, and manual hand grinders.
Electric blade grinders
The first category is probably the most common. These have a spinning blade inside that cut the beans into small pieces, a bit like a food processor. They are fairly basic in their approach (and can also be used for other items such as spices or nuts), but with the right amount of power can still do a great job.
Electrical burr grinders
Burr grinders are a bit more specialist. These machines effectively mill the coffee beans rather than chop them, crushing them between two pieces of metal or other hard material. They can extract more oils and flavour from the beans, while also producing a much more even grind, which then in turn will brew evenly for a great tasting coffee that you have full control over.
Manual hand grinders
The third category of hand grinders is in essence the most basic, given there’s no electricity and you grind the beans using elbow grease, but there’s plenty for persists to love as these grinders use a manual burr system, producing a broadly similar effect to electric burr grinders but at a generally much lower price.
Once you’ve decided which style of grinder is for you, it’s about choosing one with the right level of power, size and capacity - as well as at a price that suits. Here’s our run-down of some of the biggest and best grinders on the market, from across the grinding spectrum.
Cuisinart Professional Burr Grinder
Coffee aficionados will tell you that burr grinders are the best, and this one certainly feels it. This electric burr mill comes with the option of adapting how coarse a grind is wanted across 10 different settings, and collects the coffee in a neat lidded cup ready for use. Unlike many grinders, it also starts and stops grinding at the press of a button, meaning you don’t have to hold it down continuously if you want to grind a larger batch. A lovely piece of kit, with the only (small) downside being that it is especially loud.
Kilner Coffee Grinder
This cute grinder is basic but rather beautiful, with an old-school manual grinder screwed onto a retro-style kilner jar - bringing together a coffee grinder and somewhere to store the results. It might not be big on bells and whistles, but we were impressed with the lovely fine grid that’s easily and quickly achieved, while it not only looks good on the sideboard but is also small enough to shive into any cupboard or drawer if you’d rather. A nice product at a nice price.
Judge Hand Coffee Bean Grinder
This simple and inexpensive manual coffee grinder is as neat as they come, with even the grinding handle coming off meaning you can store it away - or carry it with you - neatly. It’s also fully adjustable allowing for finer or more coarse grains, which will alter the flavour of the coffee. The only real downside is that it’s a little flimsy feeling, flopping all over the work surface while you turn the handle to grind - perhaps a necessity of its compact, lightweight design, but not the nicest machine to use all the same.
Judge Electric Coffee Grinder
This multi-purpose electric grinder (which you could use for spices as well as coffee beans) doesn’t do badly for its low price, but there’s no mistaking a lack of power. It takes quite some time to achieve a full, fine grind, with some chunks regularly remaining. Likewise, although versatile, there’s no option to vary the coarseness of grind, making it all-in-all fairly basic.
Sage the Smart Grinder Pro
Several machines pride themselves on having a number of settings for different grind coarseness or cup sizes. But no other comes close to having as many as 60 different settings like this Heston Blumenthal-approved techy burr grinder does. It features programmable time, cup and dose settings, including allowing you to adjust the strength without altering the number of cups. Once you’ve settled on your perfect set-up, you can then save it for easy access. The Machine comes with a vacuum pot, so you could pre-grind your coffee for the next few days and keep it fresh - although personally we’d still recommend doing it as you go. It’s bigger than most, so not the best for small surfaces, and the price will be off-putting more casual grinders, but when it comes to performance it isn’t beaten.
De'Longhi Blade KG49 Coffee Grinder
At the budget end of the electric grinder market is this neat blade grinder with a particularly sleek look and a wide scale of fine to coarse settings - complete with a snazzy indicator that lights up to tell you when the beans have been ground to desired amount. It’s surprisingly efficient for a cheaper model, grinding enough for 12 cups of coffee with apparent ease, and it’s still mighty compact with it. It doesn’t have the smoothest results around, and nor is it the nicest feeling one to use, but it’s not far off which is serious praise given the price.
Rhino Hand Grinder
Always take the grinder with you… everywhere you go. Or something like that. This pepper mill-sized mini hand grinder is ideal for coffee aficionados so dedicated that they demand freshly ground beans wherever they are. Whether it’s at your desk, going camping, or in your travel bag, this nifty piece of kit delivers a fine even grind on a tiny scale. It even features an aeropress adapter, so you can take the whole coffee making shebang with you. It works well enough to be used at home, too - so if you’re short of space this might be perfect.
Dualit Burr Coffee Grinder
This is a powerful piece of kit, with a USP of grinding more slowly to prevent both clogging and too much heat being generated - and it makes it much more quiet too - though doesn’t add too much time to the grinding process. You can choose the fineness of your grind on a simple scale, which just like the rest of the machine is simple and easy-to-use while also flexible and with a real feeling of quality. A good option if you want something higher end and sturdy (not to mention good looking) but don’t want quite such a top-end price tag.
Verdict:
The winning grinder nicely blends quality with price, and for us it’s the Cuisinart Professional Burr Grinder. It’s adaptable, produces great results and the storage container to catch the coffee is a bonus. At under sixty pounds, it delivers just as well as the higher priced models, albeit with fewer techy features. However, if that still sounds like a lot for a coffee grinder and simple but effective is all you need, the Kilner Coffee Grinder is a great-looking piece of kit that does just that - you’ll just need to put some manual labour in.
