Everything is inside beans. Nothing improves your morning coffee like grinding the beans just before brewing. It doesn’t matter if you use a fancy, liquid-cooled, quantum AI-powered coffee maker or 30 Mr. Coffee— switching to whole grains will change your coffee drinking experience. At the end of this article you’ll find tips for finding good whole beans (you can read our guide to the best coffee subscriptions). Once you have your beans, it’s time to grind them fresh every day. These are the best coffee grinders we have tested.
April 2024 Update: Added Eureka Mignon Filtro, Fellow Tally Pro scale, Honorable Mentions section, and Avoid section.
What is a cone, flat and blade grinder?
Photo: Iryna Veklich/Getty Images
Our list mainly consists of conical burr grinders. In a conical grinder, coffee beans are crushed and ground between two rings of burrs. They provide a finer, much more even grind than a traditional blade grinder, even the prettiest one.
Flat burr grinders are similar, but they tend to be more expensive. In these grinders, the burrs are stacked on top of each other, and the beans pass through them as they grind. The action of the grinder pushes the grounds out from one end, rather than relying on gravity like in a conical grinder, and the beans spend more time in contact with the burrs. This produces a more even grind, but for home brewers, conical grinders are just as good—even if they require more maintenance and don’t produce uniform, micron-sized grounds.
Blade Grinders have a chopping blade that rotates like a food processor. But blades don’t produce equal results. Some of the coffee will have a fine powder at the bottom and the pieces on top will be too large to even fit in a French press. The result is an inconsistent, unpredictable brew. These grinders are cheap and yes, using fresh beans in a blade grinder is much better than buying ground coffee. (You can learn how to shake the beans to grind them just a little bit. For more information, check out this video from world barista champion James Hoffmann blade grinder hacks.)
If you can afford it, we highly recommend purchasing one of the burr grinders we’ve listed. There’s a reason they cost a bit more than a budget burr grinder. The mechanisms in a high-quality burr grinder are a bit more complicated and are built to withstand more wear and tear. Cheap burrs tend to dull the burrs with regular use, and weaker motors can burn out within a few months.
PS: Do not put ground coffee into a burr grinder. Logically, it makes sense. It’s too thick, so you’ll run it through again, right? NO! With a burr grinder, the pre-ground coffee will get stuck in the burrs and you will need to disassemble them to re-adjust them.
