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November 07, 2023

the coffee pulse newsletter

Issue 011

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Hello Mark.

First, a bit of housekeeping. This newsletter is overdue, and I apologise. As such, this is going to be the first of a two part series, with the second coming out later this week. There’s so much new content at CoffeeGeek, and our subject today is so important, that it’s going to take two issues of the Coffee Pulse to get it out. So let’s get right into it!

“What’s the secret to really good espresso?” the reporter asked. I had to think about that a bit.

“The secret is the coffee grinder.” I replied. “Everyone treats the espresso machine like the rock star, and the grinder is often an afterthought. The truth is, I can make better espresso with a $500 grinder and a $200 espresso machine, than I can with a $5,000 espresso machine and a $50 grinder. The grinder is the true rock star.”

That conversation happened in 2003 when a reporter from Canada’s Globe & Mail newspaper followed me around for a couple of days seeing how I interacted with coffee and the local Vancouver coffee scene. His work ended up being a full page feature in over a dozen Canadian newspapers that summer and that quote was printed almost verbatim.

The feature prompted several other major media sources to get in contact and do their own articles on the explosive growth of coffee knowledge fuelled by the young Internet and communities like the CoffeeGeek website. Almost every interview I did had some focus on the grinder comments I made. Some reporters thought it was snake oil. Others took it for earnest.

I added something else: I preached that, if you have between $500 and $1,000 budgeted for your home espresso setup, spend half of that on the grinder Over $1,000? Budget $500 for the grinder. This gives you tools to surpass the espresso quality produced by most cafes of the era.

$500 for an espresso grinder. Wow.

This was a state of the art, $450 espresso grinder 20 years ago, an Anfim Doser grinder.

Things have changed a lot since then. We’ve gone from having 3 or 4 espresso-primary grinder choices under $500 for consumers, to literally dozens of choices today. We’ve seen a massive shakeup and quality surge in multipurpose and brew grinders as well. There’s even a brand new category of quality hand grinders that are now available for coffee lovers, ranging from $75 to $350.

There’s one more category of grinders to come along in the last 10 years. This category got its start in the vibrant coffee communities in forums like Home-Barista and CoffeeGeek. There, serious espresso nerds started modifying grinders to suit the workflow they wanted. Bean hoppers were replaced with tiny cups that would only hold 20-30g of beans. Dosing cups were sourced and discovered, used to replace grinds bins. Grind exit chutes hacked and skeletonized to reduce grind retention. Stepped grinder settings were modified to be stepless. Bellows added to blow out any retained grinds.

The mods were often ugly, but functional. One company took note of this around 2015, and started designing a brand new grinder, built around all these mods. They introduced their new product to the world via an Indiegogo crowd-funded campaign in 2017. It was the Niche Zero, and it changed everything in espresso grinders.

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The Niche Zero is one of the most successful crowd funded coffee projects of all time, raising $15 million. The grinder’s design was based on many of the mods listed above, but also had a unique shape that worked on non-traditional (at the time) angles for all the pathways in the grinder. The angles’ purpose was to facilitate the flow of whole beans into the 63mm Mazzer conical burrs, and allow the ground coffee to flow out on a steep angle to the dosing cup.

As innovative as it was, the Niche wasn’t perfect, and never quite lived up to its rosy claims, especially in the zero-retention department. It also costs up to $1,000 to get one delivered in the USA or Canada (they’re hand made in the UK, with no vendor over in North America). Servicing them can also be costly. 

The demand for the Niche Zero demonstrated a new market was available to coffee gear manufacturers: the market for a single dosing grinder for espresso (and also for single-serve brew coffee). New cottage industry makers, traditional Italian grinder manufacturers, and a whole whack of new manufacturers from China took note.

One of the more interesting players is a Chinese maker using the brand name iTop. They introduced a range of grinders that follow the Niche Zero’s modus. A US company, called Turin Grinders, partnered up with them to bring several of these models to the US and Canada.

Two of the Turin grinders stand out: the DF64, now in its Gen 2 version, and the SK40. The DF64 Gen 2 is the first grinder I’ve seen that is a legitimate “Niche Zero Killer”. At $400, it is a fantastic design and even has a plasma generator to reduce static. Ground coffee sluces out of its exit chute like it’s floating on air. And the quality of grind can surpass that from $1,000 grinders.

The Turin SK40 is perhaps even more interesting because it is only $200. A stepless grinder built around a 40mm state of the art burr set, it works very much like the Niche Zero, but includes a bellows, all in a much smaller footprint. Side by side with the 5x more expensive Niche Zero, the espresso quality in the cup is virtually identical.

I highlight these grinders, but they are not the only ones to shine in the $200 to $400 grinder space. Companies like Varia, Option-O, Timemore, Eureka, Baratza, and a few more coming down the pipe all offer excellent espresso primary grinders at this range. We live in really good times for home espresso.

Because of this, some 20 years after I came up with the analogy on grinders vs espresso machines, I have to revise it.

I can make better espresso with a $200 grinder and a $350 espresso machine, than I can with a $5,000 espresso machine and a $50 grinder.

The best part about this updated analogy is that making quality espresso in the home has gotten cheaper over time, because we have wider access to a larger supply of quality output grinders for espresso. Even if the espresso machines have gotten a bit more expensive.

That’s espresso covered, but what about multipurpose grinders? That is what we’ll cover in the next issue. Look for it later this week!

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