The Best Espresso Grinder Under 250

Today we're going to be looking at the best espresso grinder under 250 pounds. We've done the best espresso grinder under 500. This one actually I'm more excited about because as a category when I got into coffee there wasn't very much. If you wanted an espresso grinder that was good you had to spend serious money and now prices are coming down that makes me happy. But if you are looking for a kind of first serious good espresso grinder where is your money best spent? To answer that question we have these five grinders here. First up you've got the Baratza ESP. In the UK this is the cheapest grinder coming in at about 160 pounds. Next up is the kind of oldest grinder of this bunch. I think this was released 10 years ago now. It's the Sage or Breville Smart Grinder Pro. Lists at 200 pounds but you see it for about 180. Here it's the Fellow Opus. This in the UK about 200 pounds. Next up you've got the Varia VS3. A little bit more expensive again about 240 pounds. And then at the end here you've got the DF54 just under 250 pounds. So 246 I think you paid. First up is going to be workflow. I'm going to take each grinder and pull a shot with it and talk you through dialing in, adjusting things, how it works. Then we'll taste a bunch of espresso. Obviously delicious times. Then we're going to get into some nerdy stuff. We're going to look at some particle size analysis because we can do that here. And then we'll look at things like retention testing. We'll look at sound. We'll look at things like wattages and other technical aspects of these grinders. We will of course talk about filter coffee tasting too and how these do if you're brewing say a one cup V60. Then my favorite bit of the whole thing. I get to talk about my nitpicks, my little complaints that I have with each of these grinders. And then of course we'll wrap up with a conclusion. Now there are five grinders here but we actually bought six. We bought a Smeg grinder. About 220 pounds. Looked like an espresso grinder. It's not. It's really not. It's designed for espresso machines with pressurized port filters and so it cannot grind fine enough for espresso. Which is wild to me that they have released this as an espresso looking grinder. That it can't go that fine. I have no idea why they're charging that much money for something that just does not work very well. So that was purchased for this video but it is not included in the testing because it can't do it. And I can straight up say I do not recommend that grinder in any way. Let's get on with some workflow testing. So first up the Baratza Encore ESP. Body-wise it's pretty much identical to the Baratza Encore which was one of the kind of great entry-level filter coffee grinders for home. The problem with that grinder is that it couldn't grind fine enough and precisely enough for espresso. And actually it's an interesting technical challenge behind this grinder to have it have an espresso range and a kind of filter coffee range. Now as you look at it you can see pretty big hopper on top. You can use this as a single dose grinder or of course you could theoretically fill this up with beans but it has no automatic timer mechanism here. So probably best used as a single dose grinder. The grinder adjustment is done just by twisting the hopper here and you'll see an indicator. It kind of lines up with these little dots here and we're in the espresso range. The technical sort of success of this grinder is the fact that this click from here to here is a much smaller movement of the burrs than it would be if you were here and moved one click coarser. Lots of specificity here. To grind coffee there's two choices. You can push and hold the button on the front or you can use the switch on the side. Here we're grinding into a little dosing cup that it comes with which is nice and a little base for that. If however you are grinding filter coffee or a larger dose you can grind into this dosing chamber here. Ultimately a nice simple workflow. Let's grind some coffee. As a quick end note each step I think is small enough. It's about four maybe five seconds of brew time sort of for a fixed recipe but obviously it's not a stepless grinder. The Sage Smart Grinder Pro or the Breville Smart Grinder Pro if you will. Now as I said at the start this is a much older model of grinder. It's been around for a decade now since they released the Smart Grinder Pro version and you can sort of see it comes from a different era of home espresso making. Sort of from the top down. It's a pretty big hopper on here and this is a grinder I think that was designed to have you fill this with coffee beans and then draw down a dose from that hopper of beans each time you're pulling a shot. More like a kind of commercial grinder works but in miniature. As such on the front here you've got a lovely display. A surprising amount of technology certainly for the time. With buttons on it you can control a few different things. Here you've got your grind time. Because you're theoretically grinding a portion of beans and that portion is determined by time you would want to set your time to set your dose. However today we will use it as people do in the sort of modern espresso world and we will be single dosing this so I have a weighed dose here that I will just grind through. Next button along is your sort of shot slash cup so you can have preset memories of different amounts of time. You've got your start stop slash pause button here and then your grind adjustment here. What's interesting is as you take it coarser it moves from saying two shots to saying two cups and then the grind time shifts as well because it knows that at coarser settings coffee just grinds faster. So interesting little bits of smartness in there. In terms of the grind adjustment again it's a stepped grinder and it's showing you those steps and those numbers and each step is probably similar in that kind of four-ish seconds range of brew time for a pretty standard let's say 18 in 40 out kind of recipe. This will grind into either a catch cup like this one where you might want to sort of grind into this give it a little shake before dosing into the portafilter or it does come with two portafilter holders. I've never been a huge fan of taking a cheaper grinder and grinding straight into the portafilter. You have to do a bit of extra work to get rid of clumps and get the distribution right. Grinding into a catch bin is generally a better thing but these just slot in but let's go back to the catch bin for now. We'll take the time up a little bit longer just to make sure we're gonna get everything ground through and away we go. Next up is the Fellow Opus. Now this is a grinder full disclosure that we bought on launch from the US and it is running on a power converter which I wouldn't recommend in most cases and when it comes to stuff like wattages later that may impact things but it's not too important. Ultimately I think its performance is pretty reflective of how it would be if this was a 220 volt model because most of what I want to talk about is nothing to do with how the motor runs. Let's talk about how it all works. It is a single dose grinder. You have a very snug fitting lid to your hopper here and this is your small enough hopper. Big enough that you can put in a good amount of filter coffee or a large dose if you're gonna say grind 60 grams but not too big that you're wasting space. Inside here you do get a little bit of a guidance on your sort of suggested grind settings which is a nice little touch and then you've got the grind adjustment. This is relatively simple. The smaller the number the finer the grind that's true of pretty much every sensible grinder but as we said with the Baratza ESP when you get down to kind of espresso grind settings you don't want this click to be the same as say this click over here, right? You need larger clicks over here and smaller clicks down here. They've gone a different route here which is if you take off the hopper you have a second smaller kind of micro adjustment inside here where you would need to press this down and move it that little bit coarser or that little bit finer. It's an interesting two-step solution and it does sort of change the way that the sort of readings on the outside work as well which may be slightly confusing at first. It takes a little bit of getting used to. The dosing cup here is an interesting thing. It's a pretty big dosing cup which you wouldn't necessarily want for espresso. So they have a lid with a smaller inner. I'll take this off and you can sort of see a bit more of what I'm talking about there. So you grind into this for espresso and then it's designed to fit nicely on a traditional kind of portafilter. If you don't want to do that you can take this off and just put on a normal lid and you can grind much more coffee much more easily there. So nice flexibility in that. As you can see, I'm doing here a little magnet to keep the catch cup in place and then you've got one button, simplicity. So if you push it once, it will run for about 30 seconds. If you push it twice, so tap, tap, it'll run for 60 seconds. If you go tap, tap, tap, run for 90. And if you push and hold it, it will run for 120 seconds. Most of the time, 30 seconds is fine. One final note on this, so we throw this in here. This is such a snug fitting lid to the hopper that you can use it as a bellow system. So you grind coffee. So now that we're done grinding, I can kind of bellows it out. So the Varia VS3 Gen 2, a substantial, chunky quite weighty all metal body. It's one of the heavier grinders here. You'll see on top lid and then our bellows and then of course your little anti-popcorning disc as well. Obviously this is designed as a single dose grinder. Grind adjustment is done by twisting this piece here. I guess the funnel or it's not quite part of the hopper. But this will control your grind setting. Smaller the number, the finer the grind. It is stepless and there's a little indicator ring here. One nice touch. It does come with this, a little tiny spray bottle. So you can spray a little bit of water on the beans. It's called the Ross droplet technique. We have made a whole video about this if you want to go deep into the science. So I shall do as I'm, I suppose, suggested to do. And then lid off, go for a hot start and then bellows to finish. So the catch cup comes with a little one like this which is held in place via a magnet which is always a nice touch. So here's the DF54. It's the odd one out today because it has a flat set of 54 mil burrs inside as opposed to a 38 to 40 mil conical burr set. In cheaper grinders, you tend to see conical burrs because conical burrs need a cheaper motor or don't need as an expensive or as a powerful motor as flat burrs do. They'll turn more easily. They'll break beans more easily. Flat burrs tend to require bigger, juicier motors and therefore cost more. So seeing a flat burr grinder at this kind of price point is definitely interesting. In terms of build, very solid, very weighty. Easily the heaviest grinder here. Not surprising if it's got a juicy motor inside and all metal housing. In terms of ground adjustment, you've just got a ring at the top here that you twist. It's a stepless grinder, which is nice. So infinite adjustment between the steps. In terms of workflow, it's pretty simple. There is another little bellows and lid system here and actually the anti-popcorning disc, this one is all metal. So you have a little hole through which your beans would fall or bounce off this thing and then they won't easily be able to get out again while it's grinding. There's no smart electronics here. There's just an on-off switch. So that's it. The grinder does claim to use a deionizing system here to reduce static at the output and I nearly forgot to talk about the catch cup, which as you can see is clear plastic and designed to sort of go upside down on a portafilter for the little twist and dose. You could, I guess, put a portafilter in here. As I said, I wouldn't strongly recommend it. I'd much prefer grinding into a dosing cup and working that way. Let's see how these shots all taste. Now, obviously this is not gonna be a blind tasting for any of these. As part of the research and testing for these grinders, we have done blind tastings, but we decided it was probably more useful on camera just for me to give you the summary of my experience as I taste this shot. Now this is a conical burr grinder and people expect conical burrs to produce more texture, more body, but maybe less clarity of flavor. I have to say though, I really do like the shots coming off this grinder, especially for the price point. They have nice texture. They have nice sweetness. They're maybe not maximum clarity, but I feel like plenty enough. They're not overly muddy. Just honestly very enjoyable. The Smart Grinder Pro. The shots from this are a little bit more as you'd expect from a cheaper conical grinder. They don't quite have the same cleanness as some of the other grinders have. It's a little bit muddier. It's a little bit more kind of textured and heavy and you tend to drift into those kind of chocolatier notes from coffees that may not typically express that with other grinders. Reasonable acidity kind of profile. Not bad. Just simply not great. Espresso from the Fellow Opus. Espresso from this grinder and actually from the ESP as well has been a good reminder of me not to have a closed mind about conical burr grinders that are a little bit cheaper in terms of cup quality. Both of them kind of taste more like flat burrs or the flat burr style you might expect than they do taste like conical burrs. That shot, tons of sweetness, quite bright acidity, nice texture. Really, you know, very enjoyable. I don't really have a lot of complaints about the shots that I've had from the Opus. Often I've become, you know, in blind tastings, not entirely sure which is, you know, this or the DF, which is obviously the flat burr. I would say I have been impressed by this and also the ESP as conical burr espressos having nice clarity, brightness, sweetness, all of those good things. Espresso from the Varia VS3. This has always been a classic conical burr style shot. Very heavy, much more in the kind of bassier notes. It is a muddier shot. It lacks the clarity of the other grinders here. If you like those kind of chocolatier kind of bassier styles of espresso, this may well appeal to you. Like the texture is pretty good. It's thick, it's pretty rich, but for me and my own biases, I just want a bit more clarity of flavor, a bit more explicit sweetness and a little bit less muddiness. And last of my espressos, to be honest, thankfully, it's the DF 54. Shots from the DF 54 have been the most classically flat burr styled shot where you have medium body, really nice sweetness, tons of clarity comparatively, maybe not compared to some very fancy grinders, but for this group here, probably the most clarity. Nice acidity can be a little bit higher sometimes, but not in an unpleasant way at all. For me and my style of espresso, the things that I like to drink, I have really enjoyed the shots from the DF 54. It has been, you know, I probably, if I'm honest, my favorite of the espressos from this collection. Not by a lot. I will say, you know, those two conicals, the Opus and the ESP, the Baratza, are pretty close to this. This for me does just edge it out though. I've just enjoyed it that little bit more, that extra clarity, that little extra bump of sweetness. Now we'll get into some of the nitty gritty, some of the details of the testing that we've done. We'll start there with some particle size analysis. We use an imaging particle size analyzer and we get a load of data from it. We put lots of coffee through it and I'll show you some of the outcomes. Important to understand with particle size analysis, it's not a truth about the grinder. This will show you differences in how these grinders ground one particular coffee at one particular day when set for a sort of similar outcome. So I'll show you the espresso first. They're all producing the same recipe in terms of in and out and brew time. Some variance in extraction, of course, but we have to standardize it somewhere. But this is not an objective truth about the grinder. It's just a comparative point that is interesting. Let's have a look at the charts that I have here. And you'll see, as they appear, that all of the conical grinders grind in a very similar way. And quite notably, really, the flatbed grinder produces a very different looking distribution. Its peak is a little bit finer. You can't really tell whether it's producing less fines. Perhaps it is producing slightly less fines. The conical grinders tend to produce a broader range of particle sizes, we've known this for a long time, that do go from finer to coarser in that kind of peak range. But here, looking at it, yeah, the DF stands apart. That doesn't make it a better grinder, but this does explain why and how it may be producing a different style of cup when it comes to espresso. Conversely, if you look at the VS3, you'll see that it has a bunch of interesting little spikes of particle size at the finer end of things, in the fines and sort of not fine, fine pieces, but like 100 micron in size too, which is unusual and notably different to some of the other grinders. To me, it just speaks to a greater level of inconsistency in its grind setting and would explain perhaps, perhaps, some of the additional muddiness in the cup. Now, what I'll show you next is, to me, super interesting because it's going to be the Filter Coffee particle size analysis. So they're all grinding much coarser. And as we show you these, you'll understand that there are real limitations to what you can discern from particle size analysis, without beginning to potentially kind of overfit your opinions onto the data. So yes, you could say the DF has the single highest peak. It might look the most uniform. I'm not sure I'd say that when it comes to this thing. I'm not sure I could really meaningfully pick apart any of these grinders from the particle size analysis. But as we'll see later on, when it comes to filter tasting, they do produce very different cups. And so I wanted to show this to kind of undermine myself because as I keep saying, it's not this universal truth or this incredible insight. And if you just had a particle size chart for every grinder, then you'd know which one to buy. They sometimes show you stuff and they sometimes don't. And here, I don't feel like there's a ton of really interesting information, but it's kind of useful to see that in this way. So when it comes to retention, that's a really important point with single dose grinders. And we did two kinds of retention testing here. Test one is the traditional test. You weigh 18 grams of coffee, you grind it, you weigh how much comes out. You do that a bunch of times. And so I'll show you a quick comparison to see how these are all performed. Looking at the data, I would say probably the most consistent was the DF54. Though, you know, the Buranza ESP did pretty well. The Fellow Opus definitely has some challenges around retention. You know, you really need to work the bellows on that to get sort of all the coffee out. It does tend to retain a little bit of coffee when it comes to espresso grind settings. Unsurprisingly, the Sage Grind Pro, which is not built to be a grind to order grinder, well, that also was a little bit more inconsistent in its ability to deliver exactly what you put into it. We did another kind of retention testing, though, that I think is perhaps more useful. So if you have a grinder that has half a gram of coffee in it and you dose 18 grams in and you get 18 out, well, that half gram of coffee probably has been exchanged, you know, at some point. It's the new coffee has replaced it and it's been pushed out. Can you measure sort of exchange? And so what we did here was that we started the grinders in, then pushed them all the way to a very coarse setting, ground 20 grams of coffee through it, therefore exchanging any fine pieces that were left inside for coarser pieces, and then brought it back to an espresso grind setting. If there was a lot of retained and exchanged coffee, let's say there's two grams in there, well, that next dose out of the grinder should run faster. It should have more of these coarse pieces and the extraction should drop. It should be a worse shot and the shot after that should then be better because it's then all of this new grind setting coming through. Most of the grinders did pretty well here. In some cases, you know, the shots afterwards were in fact higher extraction so that the grind setting actually may have shifted. Only two of the grinders saw a little bit of a drop-off. The DF saw a little bit of a drop-off in extraction and the Baratza Encore also saw a little bit of a drop-off in extraction, suggesting they are retaining and exchanging slightly higher doses of coffee. But overall, I would say there weren't big fall-offs in flavor or extraction really. They were still producing pretty good shots straight after grinding the very coarse coffee, indicating that almost all grinders here are doing, I think, a reasonable job of real-life retention. Of course, we need to talk about grind speed. That's definitely a thing and there's a pretty big variance here. Again, we did a espresso test, a filter coffee level test and we'll show you the data on screen in terms of how long it took these grinders to grind it through. Now, the kind of standout surprisingly slows for me are the VS3, which is a pretty slow grinder. It's also the lowest RPM grinder. It's turning the slowest. It's a small burr set. That really kind of makes sense. Interesting to me is the DF54. That's a surprisingly slow grinding for espresso, especially when you think that its filter coffee grinding is relatively fast, but definitely, definitely quite slow on the espresso front. Not a problem, just kind of remarkable, if that makes sense. Worth noting, worth remarking upon. As a final note, we also ran power consumption tests on these things. You'll see at the bottom of any electrical appliance, it'll have a rated wattage, what it should draw. We like to test if it does that, and typically, they'll draw more power at an espresso setting where the motor has to work harder than at a filter coffee setting. Interesting to me is that the Baratza's rating is just way off, weirdly way off. It was rated at 70 watts and we recorded in excess of 130, so don't know what that's about. The Opus, totally fine. The DF54, again, and I think the DF64 in a previous video did this, again, above rated wattage. We got to 170 watts at a rated wattage of 150. I don't think this is dangerous, though if you are trying to calculate the amount of total draw going into, say, a single socket, because you've got them all on extension, you probably would really want to know what it's actually going to draw, not what it says it's going to draw. The Sage, again, crept up a little bit, 188, not the one advertised of 165. And then the Varia, pretty low wattage, you know, 96 rating. 80 is about the peak that we got out of it. Now, of course, for me personally, and I know for a lot of you watching, sound is a really big deal. So as usual, we've done the same setup where we have a microphone, a fixed distance from the grinder, we have a sound meter, a fixed distance from each grinder, and we'll run the grinders empty and grinding and let you listen, I hope very clearly, to how each of them sound. For us, it's definitely an assessment, not just of total volume, but of quality of sound. And I think the recordings are actually a pretty good representation of the sound quality. It really matters to me. It's a kind of something I'm going to go through or hear every morning before I've had coffee. I don't necessarily want a noisy, screaming, screeching thing. And for me, it's a big negative. For a lot of people, though, I know it isn't. But here is the comparison of sound. We did also do a filter tasting here. We actually filmed the blind tasting of the filter coffee tasting. So for me, in summary, I really do like the filter coffee from the DF54, but I feel like you just have to push it that little bit finer to get a higher extraction. And then I think the cups are really very good. You know, if you are someone who measures extraction, and I know there's not a lot of you, but I would just aim on the higher end of things. If you have one of those grinders and you feel the cup is a bit lacking, don't be afraid to push it that little bit finer. I will say that the Opus performed incredibly well across testing. I really like the filter coffee from that. And I like the filter coffee from the Baratza as well. I'm surprised that I don't dislike the coffee from the Sage Smart Grinder Pro more. It's not the best. It doesn't really truly compete with the others, but it's better than I thought it was gonna be. But for me, the one that sort of struggled the most in this testing was definitely the Varia VS3. The cross-filter bruise, it has just lacked the clarity and sweetness that other grinders have been able to achieve. Even the Sage Smart Grind Pro has been, I think, a notable step above. Going back to those particle size distributions, I can't see it in there. I can't explain it away with that particular metric. I think that's interesting, but it's definitely been something sort of consistent across testing. It's time for nitpicks. I always love a little nitpick. This grinder is where we'll start. That's because we started with it in the first place. I will say, in fairness, I don't have a ton of nitpicks with this. I have some substantial issues in that the noise for me, like so many Baratza grinders, is really a problem. It's kind of a deal breaker. I don't think I could invite this into my house and listen to it every single morning without being annoyed by it. That's me. I may be a little bit sensitive to it, especially early in the morning, but I just wish they'd make quieter grinders. They're great. They're affordable. They perform well. I just wish they were a little bit quieter. I think they've done a pretty good job with the grind adjustment system here, though I can't help but note that in a world of increasingly common stepless grinders, we're still working with steps here, and I'd love a little bit more control and precision here, just for sort of messing around a little bit. I don't really understand why there's a button on the front here. I'm never gonna push and hold a button when there's an on-off switch, but actually, that's it. I can't really complain about the build feeling a little bit light and plastic, but it gets a pass. It's 160 quid, which I think is kind of amazing. The Smart Grinder Pro perhaps gets a little bit of a pass for having been in the market for 10 years and having been a kind of pioneering model and option for people at this kind of price point. I think that's a good thing and a laudable thing, but in comparison to the other grinders here today, there's a few things we should talk about. Styling-wise, fit finish feels a little bit cheap, not horrific, but that little bit of plastic here, massive hopper. It feels quite big and bulky, and I don't love how it looks. It's not a great catch cup. It's just not that great to work with. It's really big and weirdly sized, and it has this funny lid thing that lets you close the hole and stuff. In terms of other performance, the retention is an issue. It's just not built to do grind to order, and so that's kind of on me for using it wrong, but it is quite hard work to sort of give it a bit of a thump and get all the coffee out if you are trying to single dose with it. As a final complaint, it has a pretty good range of grind settings, but we actually found it couldn't quite go coarse enough without making a second adjustment. Your primary grind adjustment is done here on the grind adjustment dial. There's another way to adjust it by taking off the hopper, accessing the burr, and adjusting the kind of burr ring. That will give you a bit more range. That's not a great experience, and so I kind of wish they'd just given me a little bit more range on the coarse end, assuming that I wanted the fine end to be good for espresso. For its flaws and its failures, it's been a good value option for a long time, and I'm glad it's been around. The Opus. I have to say, while it looks nice, the plastic on it does feel that little bit too cheap for me for this price point, especially with some of the other comparative options out there. Now, if you've seen any review of the Opus grinder before, this one, you'll have seen people complain about the grind adjustment. It's a really strange decision. It's not a particularly intuitive one. Barats in the past have done like two rings that you adjust, you know, a coarser adjustment and a finer adjustment, something like that would have been nice, but the idea that you have to take off a hopper, awkwardly press and adjust a grind setting inside it like that, that's one of the two big headaches for me with this grinder. The other one really is retention. Like, it is annoying to fight this grinder to get the coffee back out of it again, and I really like the coffee that it makes. I was impressed by that, and that made these other two frustrations doubly annoying, you know what I mean? I just want it to be great. If it was more intuitive to use, if it didn't retain coffee, I'd forgive the build in a heartbeat. I just wouldn't think about it. I'd be like, this is a great grinder for the money, but those two things are frustrating. In addition, I like the idea that you have this solution for dosing into the portafilter. I have reasonably large hands. I find holding this to dose a portafilter a little bit uncomfortable. I just don't really want to do that. I'd be much happier just with this. If you gave me this, I would be fine, but this doesn't have the nice little magnet. This doesn't sit nicely underneath. So I kind of wish that I either had a dosing cup or an espresso dosing cup and not a kind of amalgam of the two. It works well. I have no real complaints about its actual function as a dosing cup, but it's just not hugely ergonomic to hold even if you've got very large hands. A quick positive and a quick negative to wrap up. I don't like bellows on most grinders. I feel ridiculous doing it. It feels like sort of squeezing a clown nose. I don't like it. This flush fitting hopper as a bellows doesn't offend me because it looks nice and it's invisible. It's not the best to use, but it works. I really don't mind it. It's not explicitly sort of sold as such, I guess. The downside is that you can see on the inside of here what looks like just wear and tear from mild usage as bellows. And so I'm kind of confused. Am I supposed to use it for that? Which clearly works well because I clearly need something to help me with the retention of this grinder. But if it is that, why is it causing such wear on the inside of the hopper? That's just, for me, I don't quite get it. The Varia VS3. I'm afraid it's going to have a little bit of a longer section on nitpicking because it's got a few issues. Start with the lighter stuff. No pun intended. I wouldn't recommend the white because actually this gets dirty really quickly. You know, it's messy enough that it really, really shows. And so for me, I probably would recommend the black color. I will say the first time I got this out of the box, I was excited because the build on it is so substantial and so solid that I was like, wow, they've really, you know, put money and effort into this grinder. It's weighty, it's solid, it's metal bodied. That was a good thing. It felt like it was going to last. Now there were a bunch of issues with longevity on the first issue of the Varia and I'm hopeful that they fixed most of those with this. I did not have an issue in my first gen and I have not had an issue in my second gen with any sort of parts failures or anything like that. Its biggest single frustration for me is its inability to keep the grind that you set it at. At espresso settings, there's enough friction between the burrs that it starts to drag the grind setting away from where you set it. By grinding coffee, you cause the grinder to change its grind setting. That's not okay. That's not acceptable. That's a very frustrating user experience to have. This is not a sort of uncommon issue either. If you look online, other people are experiencing this too and there aren't really much offered in the way of solutions. It can be, you know, don't use as much lube on the threading so that it moves in a more difficult way. Like there's more friction on this movement. Other grinders have fixed this. Other grinders do not have this problem. They have stepless adjustments that don't shift during grinding. I've seen other grinders that do have this issue but it really shouldn't be there. It's a fundamental problem and I think it's really not good. This, in addition, the anti-popcorning disc does a really good job of stopping coffee getting into the burrs, which is frustrating. So there's no way I would ever grind coffee through this without checking that it had all gone through because chances are there's a good amount of coffee. This gap is actually pretty small. It just doesn't work very well. And so I probably would just take this out and not use it but be aware that if you don't get the lid on pretty quick you might get some popcorning. As I've said, I'm not a huge fan of bellows generally. These are fine as they go. At least it's a nice metal lid that does magnet on top if you want to take the bellows out but you kind of need the bellows to improve the retention on this thing. I will say on the kind of mixed blessing front, it is slow to grind but the upside of that is that it's actually the least offensive to listen to grind. It's the quietest. It probably sounds the nicest of all the grinders here but it does take nearly twice as long as some of the other ones. So it's a... When it comes to sound, it's worth noting that, you know a short sharp pain is different to a long lasting pain which is different to a even longer lasting relatively pleasant sound. So I guess point there for slow RPM. Small buzz at sure, but not the noisiest grinder. Probably the quietest of the grinders and that should be acknowledged. And this is one last complaint. This is the power brick for this thing. Now the good news is in theory this is transforming it into DC power. So you can switch this cable out and you can run this grinder all over the world and it would work fine. You just have to change that little cable feeding this. But this is a lot to house on your kitchen worktop. You know, if you want to plug your grinder in right by where it is you've got to find a home for this and there's no way around it. The DF54 is a fascinating little grinder. It's quite unusual. If I think back to the best grinders under 500 pounds one of the grinders there was the X54 a 54 mil grinder, pretty much twice the price from Malkinig. And this half that price is a substantially better grinder. It's better built. It's better performing. It doesn't have the bells and whistles but that's kind of charming for me. It's a very simple thing. And I think that's okay. A couple of issues. One again, yes, it has a good anti-popcorning disc but two, I still don't like bellows. I just don't enjoy that experience. And it is like many of the other DF grinders out there messy. This says it has an ionizer. I would not grind coffee with this thing without having spread some water on those beans first. And yeah, a bit like the others if you are too aggressive with this right at the end, you can blow coffee back out of this thing here which is a little bit annoying. I don't mind the plasticky dose cup. I don't mind that it really has a dial and a button and that's it. It has no smart features. And I will take that in exchange for a relatively inexpensive, high quality flat bow grinder. One last little note, I guess is worth bringing up. This stepless adjustment dial does not slip during grinding but it is much more difficult to adjust. So even just small adjustments probably a two-handed affair. I'm surprised at how hard it is. And it's something you have to worry about. If you want to take the burrs out if you want to go all the way course on this going then back all the way fine. You've really got to make sure you've gone all the way kind of to zero. It's easy to be kind of one revolution short because it is that hard to turn sometimes. I need to add a little clarification at this point about this grinder. I did complain endlessly about how messy it was. And then we gave it a really good clean including cleaning the ionizer and it performed way better. So if you are having issues with static with this thing give the ionizer a clean but it is also annoying that the ionizer gets dirty kind of relatively quickly. And so the performance does degrade. I just felt it was important to clarify that. It's time to wrap it up. What are my conclusions? Well, firstly, I'm very happy at the options available to people at this price point now. I really feel like there's some very good high quality grinders able to make very delicious coffee at under 250 pounds. And I think that's great. Are all of these grinders of the same level? No, I don't think so. And different ones may find different homes. Starting over here, the Baratza I think is incredibly good value for money. I'm genuinely surprised at how cheap this is and how good it is for that money. It's simple, it's noisy but it does make really nice coffee. The Sage, I get how it's been successful for so long. It pioneered the market. It's a little bit out of date now and I wouldn't be surprised if there's something new coming relatively soon. Obviously Sage Breville acquired Baratza a couple of years ago now and there may be more crossover in those lines. You're certainly seeing it in Breville's espresso machines that have built-in grinders. Anyway, it's a good little grinder. It's maybe not the greatest for filter coffee but it's better than I thought it was gonna be. It's okay, it's just not really up to spec, up to modern standards when it comes to grinding to order. The Opus is a point of great frustration for me. I really like the cups of coffee that it made. I really did. I was surprised by them. I think it makes really nice filter coffee. I think it makes great shots of espresso. Some of the usability though is a bit of a headache for me. This thing, if you are only interested in espresso and you really like texture above all else and you want sort of richness and heaviness and basiness in your espresso, I could see going towards this. There are a bunch of issues with it and I hope they continue to iterate and improve upon it. I like the build. I like the design. I like a lot about it. It just needs to hold its grind setting and maybe get rid of the giant power brick. Those kinds of things would make it a bit more of a contender for me. As someone like me who likes flat-burr style coffee, this is an incredibly good value offering, I think. For a 54 mil burr set, you don't have a ton of burr options out there but it's built solidly. It works well. I like the cups of coffee that it makes. It's a simple grinder. If you don't pay attention, it's very messy but a quick spritz before you grind is not the end of the world and I would take that as a compromise to get the cup quality that I get from this thing. It's not perfect but it is really pretty good and if you're interested in a flat-burr grinder then I think it's a great starting point on flat-burr grinding at home. I'm impressed by this, I think, in many ways. It's not head and shoulders above everything else but it is a little bit more aligned to my coffee preferences and that's how I should explain these things. But these two here, most definitely worthy of consideration and you wanna pay attention to things like customer sales and support, you know, where you are in the world. You wanna make sure that if something goes wrong you can get it fixed and that may rule out a grinder like this and rule in one of these grinders here. But now I wanna hear from you. Do you own one of these grinders? Have I been overly harsh? Have I been too kind even? Are there things about them, quirks you've discovered from using them every single day that you want to share with us and the wider community? I would love to hear your thoughts down in the comments below whether you have one of these grinders or whether you don't. If there's things we should have tested, let me know. We always wanna improve the reviews that we do, make them better and more exhaustive and hopefully more helpful to you too. But for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a great day.