Baratza Encore Electric Burr Coffee Grinder

Product Information

Almost every part of the Baratza grinder is repairable or replaceable, which is rare among grinders designed for home use, and the company has detailed video guides for many fixes. Please bear in mind that not all manufacturers provide correct imagery and we may put a similar or alternative image to the actual product for illustration purposes only. And if you keep grinding until you have no half-beans left, you’re likely to get a lot of fine powder. With a manual hand grinder, features are also minimal: You can grind only about 18 to 35 grams at a time.

Our picks will grind your coffee fine enough to make a shot with a pressurized machine or a stovetop brewer. Some machines have burrs that are off the shelf, so to speak, while other companies spend the time to design their own, with the hopes that their teeth and grooves more perfectly cut beans into consistent pieces. The sifter works by separating boulders and fines into separate compartments; grounds at the ideal size are left in between.Some grinders do make claims about using special types of glass, magnets or metal to reduce static electricity. Kyle Ramage said he worries more about there being too many boulders than too many fines, partly because fines are inevitable as brittle beans are jostled or ground, and partly because he thinks boulders are what really muddy the flavor of the coffee. This sounds complicated at first, but it is not very hard to master, especially if you’re the only one using it every day. You may have already read that the most important component of your coffee making setup is a quality burr grinder, one that will grind beans evenly—no matter how coarse or fine you want your grounds. The efficient DC motor keeps your beans cool, even during extended grind times, while a combination of electric and gear speed reducers slow the burr to 450 RPM, ensuring a smooth bean feed and reducing noise, heat and static buildup.

It also has slightly larger settings, as in the space between the adjustments is just a teeny bit larger—for most aficionados, the smaller those spaces, the better. Lots of directions for different brewers (either online or with the included manual) will actually specify grind sizes for the Baratza Encore. Those beans leave more of a residue, which you need to remove occasionally (every few weeks, for oily beans) for peak flavor and grinder performance. We love the Baratza Encore’s straightforward controls, which make your daily brew experience simple. The problem is so regular that I now recognize the sound of when the grinder is on but not grinding beans,” she said, “I have to constantly give it a shake, and even that doesn’t work at times.For each machine, we considered the following: Are there obvious large coffee particles (boulders) and small particles (fines)? Unlike blade grinders, which randomly blitz coffee beans into smaller and smaller pieces, burr grinders cut coffee beans between a set of two grooved burrs, the same way flour is milled. But with a stepless grinder, if you change the grind setting at all (for example, if you like to switch between coffee-brewing methods), it’s not easy to repeat the optimal settings for your daily brews.

The rings of these burr sets are lined with knobby protrusions that look more like teeth than sharpened grooves, and they act like teeth, too, chewing and breaking beans instead of cutting them. The top-ranked manual grinders, those with the broadest range, best design and most precision, are still more expensive than our budget pick, but there are now at least a few options at the lower end that produce excellent results. It won’t produce the tiny adjustments in fine grinds that thrill serious espresso enthusiasts, but its output is consistent enough to create a decent shot. This means you have to measure the beans before or after grinding in some way—with a scale, a scoop, by eye, or your own preferred method.The hopper can hold 8oz (227g) of whole beans, and the clear grounds bin has a fill line to indicate how much to grind. A typical run with the Baratza for me is that I measure out 30 grams of coffee, dump them in the hopper, turn on the machine, let it run until it stops sounding like it’s grinding anything at all, and then turn it off. Over years of testing, we’ve consistently found that even the casual coffee drinker notices the difference in taste between poorly ground and properly ground coffee. We also feel duty bound to address the fact that the Encore is not one of the most cutting edge in terms of external design, which is a bit of a bummer. The OXO’s burr sets are also slightly faster (grinding 10 grams more than the Encore in 15 seconds) and just a little bit quieter than those of the Baratza machines when grinding through beans—though the motor sound is a little higher and whinier.

Once we separated boulders and fines, we were able to see how many of those boulders were extra-large or odd-shaped, which can also affect the way coffee tastes. As we already mentioned, even small variations in grind size make a big difference: Be sure to experiment with your grinder to find the best-tasting setting, instead of taking the grinder’s recommendations as gospel. The original Encore however is just a good sturdy little burr grinder mainly for manual brew methods, and it really is quite a lot of grinder for the money.

The only complaint I have after more than a year using it is that the grind adjustment dial does not have any numbers on it to help set it up to the desired grind size.