Pre-ground coffee starts losing flavour within days of the bag being opened, since grinding exposes far more surface area to air than whole beans do. If you’ve ever wondered whether buying whole beans and grinding them yourself actually makes a noticeable difference, the honest answer is yes, but only if the grinder itself is doing a consistent job.
The Baratza Encore is the one that keeps coming up in coffee forums as the entry point worth spending on rather than the grinders sold in supermarket kitchen aisles. It uses 40mm conical steel burrs manufactured in Europe rather than the spinning blade that chops beans unevenly in cheaper models, and that consistency is what actually changes how your coffee tastes, not the price tag.
There are 40 grind settings, covering everything from a fine espresso grind through to the coarse setting you’d want for a cafetiere or cold brew, so it isn’t locked into one brewing method. The hopper holds around 300g of beans and the catch bin underneath takes 120g of grounds, which is plenty for a few days of coffee for most households without constant refilling.
It runs on a DC motor with a direct-drive gearbox, started either with the on/off switch on the side or a pulse button on the front if you just want a short burst rather than grinding through a full batch. It’s a fairly plain plastic-bodied machine rather than something showy, but the burrs are the part that actually matters and they’re built to stay sharp for years of regular use, backed by a one-year warranty.
If you’ve been putting off buying a grinder because you assumed they were all roughly the same, this is worth trying. The gap between a bag of pre-ground supermarket coffee and beans ground fresh right before brewing is bigger than most people expect.
