Baratza Encore Electric Burr Coffee Grinder

Product Information

The Encore is our only pick (besides the hand grinder) that doesn’t have a timer or some automated way to measure out beans, but we’ve found it’s easy enough to measure your beans before you add them to the hopper—and many coffee aficionados already do that.

There are also burr sizes—the wider the burr, the faster it will grind; in this guide, the burrs in most of the best electric machines hover around 40 millimeters in width, while manual burrs are often slightly smaller.It looks nicer, and with the handle folded down, the C2 is easier to fit between items on your countertop or in a drawer—and is a lot harder to knock over accidentally. 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. In our tests we looked for machines that had easily removable parts—particularly around the burr set—to allow for regular cleaning and, if necessary, replacement. We know that it still may be a tough sell for those who don’t consider themselves major coffee geeks, but we think spending more is well worth it for most coffee drinkers—whether that worth is measured in more cups made at home, fewer dead grinders sent to the landfill, or just added daily pleasure from making your own delicious coffee. Compared to Baratza’s older Maestro models, the Encore device has an improved gearbox for quieter operation and a sturdier design.

We love and use our Baratza Encore grinder to do that most of the time, and we’d love to tell you why. So the swapping of different collections of beans you keep in the hopper is a cool feature we didn’t want to pay for. The sifter works by separating boulders and fines into separate compartments; grounds at the ideal size are left in between. 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. 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.My only complaint is that I wish I knew of a better system for cleaning the hulls/grounds out of every nook and cranny. These burr grinders cost less in part because their burr sets aren’t as good as a conical or flat set (video). In our original coffee lab trials, only the professional-grade Mahlkönig EK43 yielded a more uniform grind than Baratza’s machines. A final benefit (that I kind of expected because I’m a nerd, but you might not) is that you’ll see reference to Baratza’s Encore coffee grinder all over the coffee world.