Martin Nicholson who designed this grinder, was very experienced when it came to designing products, after working as a product designer for a few decades for some of the UK's most well-known brands, but thankfully, he wasn't particularly experienced where coffee grinders were concerned. This is the slightly more budget sibling to the Sage Smart Grinder Pro which I'll talk about shortly, and the main differences are that it has a slightly lower-powered motor (130W vs 165W) and that you adjust the grind via the hopper while on the smart grinder pro, there's an LCD screen and a grind adjustment dial, oh and the hopper is slightly smaller and holds fewer beans too, 240g capacity vs 450g. The KG79 has 16 different grind settings, ranging from very fine to very coarse. This allows you to choose the perfect grind size for your coffee beans, whether making espresso or French press coffee. The grind settings are easy to adjust using the dial on the front of the machine. Large Hopper For decades, Gaggia had the Gaggia MDF grinder, which I always thought was a bit of a funny one, as it was a grinder aimed at the domestic market but had a doser.

I think this little grinder is OK when it comes to looks. I don't think it's going to win any design awards but it's certainly not offensive in any way, and it has a nice small footprint at 13cm wide, 16cm deep, and 26cm tall. Noise Levels This is where there is the greatest amount of choice. These all have proper burrs, either conical or flat, and they tend to be specialist grinders, either brew specific or espresso specific, with a couple of exceptions. There also an increasing number of the mid and premium range grinders that are being made purely for single dose use. As I've mentioned this is one of the grinders that have these blunt grinding wheels, and while in theory, I'd rather have burrs than blades, and at least you can select a grind size with these, the fact is that they're really crushing the beans rather than grinding them. Some of the marketing blurb does have me shaking my head, if I'm honest, for example, this is listed as working for espresso, cappuccino, and Americano… The obvious error with this is that they're all the same thing, cappuccino and Americano are of course made from espresso, and actually, saying that a grinder is compatible with espresso is an error, too, although it's an error many of the grinder brands make.I can tell you from personal experience that these grinders are sturdy, because when I tried to grind a lump of copper with this grinder, twice – it did no damage whatsoever. No, I didn't do this on purpose ;-). The grinder jammed and turned itself off, I adjusted the grind much more coarse and tried grinding again, but it jammed again. I took it apart and discovered that a lump of copper had ended up in with some coffee beans I'd received, odd. I removed it, with no problem whatsoever.

So if a big brand with a decent distribution network manages to create a real contender to the Niche, this gives them, via their distribution network, access to this market that Niche has all to themselves. If you're wanting to grind for manual brew methods such as Cafetiere, Aeropress, filter, etc., and if you're on a tight budget, then the KG79 will just about do, in my humble opinion. You could do better, but only by spending a bit more – or by going for a manual grinder. You can get better grind quality at this kind of price with manual grinders. And it's also possible to make this work better for espresso by simply attaching a piece of pipe over the grinds chute, so you can grind directly into your portafilter.For brew methods like pourover, filter coffee machines, Aeropress and so on, you'll be able to grind fine enough, but still, I'd recommend going for a grinder with proper burrs if you can, as the improved particle uniformity these will provide, should translate into better cup quality. So if you can, I would very highly recommend that you skip this section and move swiftly on, but if you can't stretch the budget & you absolutely must get one of the cheaper blade grinders, then have a look at these: I've included the previous few paragraphs about grinding speed to give some context to this so that people don't take this purely as a positive, because in this case the fast grinding speed of this grinder is probably at least partly responsible for the negative points of this grinder, including the heat of the grinds, static, and the inconsistency of the grind, which I'll get to shortly. Grind Consistency The bellows and the lid leave a bit to be desired, I think this is the worst feature of the grinder where looks are concerned, the main body of the grinder looks really good for the money, but they do the job, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Barista & Co have come up with a different, and quite intriguing design for this coffee grinder, with a removable grinding unit. This part can be easily removed to clean, which means it can be easily replaced too.

Espresso specialist grinders usually have stepless adjustments, which makes them great purely for espresso, but not so good for jumping around to grind for different brew methods. In fact, when I've taken a couple of these apart to inspect the burrs, I've noted that the only real sharp surface is the heads of the screws that keep the burrs in place.It’s the ideal Christmas gift for your loved ones. Or just treat yourself and say goodbye to bad coffees forever. This is done to reduce heat generation, as a faster spinning burr creates heat, and heat can mess with the flavour. Reducing the spinning speed also reduces static, and can lead to generally better quality coffee grinding. So what they've done is devised a wa