6 Best Coffee Grinders for Pour

By Serena Dai

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For a long time, I did not understand why the coffee I made at home was so, so much worse than the cups I was getting at my local third-wave coffee shop. I bought the expensive fair-trade coffee beans, which I ground myself. I tried the barista-approved brewing methods, like a pour-over or French press. And yet my at-home brews never tasted as good as the drip coffee I paid $3 for someone else to make. Exasperated, I asked my biggest coffee snob friend where I’d gone wrong. You need to change your damn grinder, he said.

Fellow food lovers with rudimentary coffee knowledge, I beg of you: Stop spending all your cash on precious coffee beans unless you’re also investing in a high-quality burr grinder like the Baratza Encore. Yes, the best coffee grinders are much pricier than the type of grinder I was using in the past—a $30 blade grinder—but my Baratza has transformed my daily coffee from tolerable to luxuriant and has dramatically cut down on my impromptu café spending.

There are two different types of coffee grinders: burr grinders (the kind you’ll find in coffee shops) and blade grinders (the dinky plastic gadget that doubles as a spice grinder). Both grinders will break down whole beans, but the results are vastly different.

Burr grinders crush the coffee beans between two revolving, serrated surfaces called burrs (hence, the name). This technique is more likely to yield an even grind, which means the beans’ flavors will be released evenly in your brew. The price point for a good burr grinder starts around $100—but if you want to take your coffee routine to the next level, it’s worth the investment.

Blade grinders, which you can buy for as little as $20, use a more, ahem, violent approach. A conical blade whirrs around the chamber like a propeller, chopping those pricey beans into sad bruised bits. In addition to damaging the beans, this technique is less likely to give you an even grind: Some beans could end up in bigger chunks, while others may be powdery. As a result, a blade grinder is more likely to produce slightly bitter coffee or a brew that isn’t quite as flavorful as the ones you get at a coffee shop.

Burr grinders start around $100, and at different price points, you’ll find a variety of features. Here are a few key distinctions to look out for, based on your choice brewing method:

Sure, the pricier grinders come with some great benefits, but if you’re just starting to upgrade your coffee game, the Encore is the cheapest of Baratza’s offerings at $150, and it will—I can’t emphasize this enough—change your coffee life.

Most important, the Encore is very easy to use. An accompanying guide will tell you which number to set your grind at based on how you’re making the coffee—with a French press, drip machine, pour-over, or espresso machine. Simply turn a switch for it to start and use the ground beans as you wish. I brew mine with the Oxo coffee maker, and thanks to this grinder, it’s a cup of coffee that tastes fuller, more aromatic, and more nuanced than my previous home brews. These days I can identify why some beans say they’re “chocolaty” and others claim “notes of blueberry,” something I was never able to discern in the past when making coffee at home.

Note that this machine doesn’t grind coffee directly into an espresso filter basket—so if you’re drinking espresso consistently, you might want to splurge on the Baratza Virtuoso+ model.

The Encore strikes a perfect balance between affordability and functionality, but there are plenty of great burr grinders at every price point. Here are a few of our favorites:

With a $250 price tag, the Baratza Virtuoso+ is a step up from the entry-level Encore. The high-end grinder comes with a few additional features that make the purchase worth it—most notably, a digital timer that’s adjustable to a tenth of a second and the ability to grind directly into an espresso filter basket. With sharper, sleeker burrs than the Encore, it’s able to grind coffee faster and with more precision. The Encore works well with standard drip machines, but if you have an espresso machine or really want to dial in your pour-over game, the Virtuoso+ is a worthy investment.

If you’re looking for a café-quality burr grinder that also looks great on your countertop, go for one of Fellow’s modern burr grinders: the Ode or the Opus. The Ode Gen 2 ($345), which won a Best New Product award from the Specialty Coffee Association in 2021, is compact, easy to use (simply set the dial to your desired grind size and press a button), and relatively quiet. Food director Chris Morocco uses this model at home: “It does a better job than most grinders at containing any mess and flyaway chaff (you fans of light roast coffees will know what I am talking about).” Its café-quality stainless-steel flat burrs will help you produce a top-notch at-home brew. The one downside of the Ode Gen 2 grinder is that it does not grind finely enough for espresso—use it for pour-over, drip, and French press coffee only.

If you’re looking for a less expensive electric coffee grinder with a wider range of settings (including an espresso grind), go for the Opus—which, according to Chris, “dropped out of heaven into all our collective laps.” At $195, it's more expensive than the Baratza Encore, but the 10 grind settings (from fine espresso to coarse cold brew) and minimalist design make this a very worthy upgrade. The Opus is full of thoughtful features, like a magnetically aligned catch cup that slides right into place when you’re ready to grind and a smaller “dosing cup” for an easy, mess-free transfer of a single espresso shot’s worth of grounds to the portafilter. Unlike the Encore, which can store a larger quantity of beans in the hopper, the Fellow models are designed to grind individual doses—a plus if you live in a household where one person likes a dark espresso roast and the other prefers a light roast for pour-overs. Grind to order in one of these sleek machines and everyone’s happy.

If you’re starting out on your coffee journey and not ready to shell out over $100 for an ultra-precise grinder, this Oxo burr grinder ($99) is just the thing. With a simple, intuitive design and excellent consistency, it’s the least expensive option on the market that still delivers a quality grind for home use. Like the Fellow grinders, the Oxo bean grinder operates on a numbered dial, which you can set to an ultrafine or coarse grind, but the range is only 15 settings. While Fellow’s user-friendly grinders default to a 30-second grind, with the Oxo grinder, you can adjust the grind time on a separate windup timer (although it maxes out at 30 seconds, so you’ll have to rinse and repeat for larger batch brews). Though it can achieve a grind fine enough for espresso, it doesn’t grind directly into a portafilter, so the transfer process from grinder to espresso maker can be a bit messy. But all in all, it’s a good coffee grinder for the unfussy but dedicated coffee drinker.

Want to get a morning arm workout as you brew your cup of joe? Switch from an electric grinder to a manual coffee grinder; this one from Flair is Chris’s pick for the best espresso. The little device has conical steel burrs and 72 fine-grind settings, giving you plenty of options to customize your espresso grind. It has an easy-to-grip silicone body and a convenient thumb rest for seamless grinding, plus, it doesn’t take up any counter space. Note that this hand grinder is designed specifically for espresso but will also work for brewing techniques that require a finer grind, like the Aeropress, Turkish coffee (boiled in a cezve), or coffee made in the moka pot. Don’t open a café with it, but if you’re going camping with your Aeropress or are just an occasional espresso drinker, this grinder’s got you.

Outfit your coffee suite with a shiny new espresso machine, drip coffee maker, or any of our favorite coffee machines.

Zoe Denenberg contributed additional reporting to this piece.