7 Best Coffee Grinders, Tested and Reviewed (2025) | WIRED

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Best All-Around Grinder (and the Quietest)

Best Versatile Grinder for Espresso Lovers

Best Flat-Burr Grinder for Drip and Pour-Over

Best Budget Conical Burr Grinder

coffee Is Only as good as the beans you use to make it. And the best coffee grinders help bring out that flavor. Beans ground right before you brew don't just taste better than the pre-ground bags you buy in the supermarket: They might as well be a whole different substance, full of aroma and flavor compounds that quickly go lost when left to get stale in oxygenated air. (It does also help to use beans from excellent roasters: Check out our Best Coffee Subscriptions guide, which includes some of our favorites.)

Getting the right grind on your beans is just as important as grinding fresh. Uneven grinds lead to uneven extraction, and uneven flavor. With espresso especially, the right grinder can be the difference between ecstasy, agony, and simple defeat. Luckily, WIRED has your back. The Gear Team has tested dozens of grinders over the past five years to find the best coffee grinders on the market for those looking to get the best grind and the best flavor without breaking the bank. The seven machines below are the best coffee grinders we've tested.

Be sure to check out other coffee-related buying guides from WIRED, like the Best Drip Coffee Makers, Best Espresso Machines, and Best Cold Brew Devices. For super-automatic machines that include grinders already and might even call your mom for you on Mother's Day, check out the Best Latte and Cappuccino Machines.

Updated April 2025: We've added the Kingrinder K6 and Aarke flat-burr grinder, and retested the Fellow Ode Gen 2. We also streamlined, updated, and reorganized the guide throughout, as well as checked and updated links.

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Why Grind Whole Beans Instead of Buying Pre-Ground?

The reasons are simple: Flavor. Freshness. Aroma.

Whenever you open a vacuum-sealed bag of beans, a little invisible clock starts. Oxidation begins to erode the character of your beans, breaking down organic compounds and degrading them, turning your lovely beans to cardboard. Aromatic flavor compounds also escape from the bean, gassing out into the air where they do no particular good.

When you grind your beans, these processes goes into overdrive. Freshness for whole beans can be measured in weeks. For ground beans, freshness in the open air is a matter of hours or even minutes. That bag of pre-ground beans you got from the supermarket? It's still coffee, of course, and it'll taste like coffee. But the vibrancy is gone. As far as true freshness is concerned, that coffee's been dead for weeks. (Pre-ground beans can be kept airtight for a week or so and maintain their flavor, if you get them ground fresh at a coffee roaster.)

The only reliable way to get truly excellent flavor from your coffee beans, the way you experience it at a cafe, is to use fresh, whole beans. This is also how you can exercise some control over extraction, and dial in your brewer or espresso maker to get the pefect results for each bean.

Espresso requires a fine grind, pour-over a little coarser, electric drip coffee a little coarser than this. Each grinder should have a guide to the best adjustments for each brewing method. Lighter-roast beans will want a finer grind than dark-roast, to aid in extraction: porous dark-roast beans give up their secrets a lot easier.

It's all kinda fun to figure out, if you let it be fun. But certainly, when you strike paydirt, you'll know it: Finding the right marriage of grind and bean, on a good grinder, can turn into the best cup you've ever had. It's like the magical first time you seared a perfect steak, or baked a perfect layer cake. Effort meets reward. It's marvelous. The grinders in this guide will help you find that moment more often.

What Is a Conical, Flat, or Blade Grinder?

Most coffee grinders fall into three main types: Conical-burr, flat-burr, and blade grinders. Burr grinders are generally higher quality, and higher cost.

Conical-burr grinders are the category occupied by both of our top two picks, the Fellow Opus and the ESP. And there's a reason for this: Conical tends to offer the sweet spot at the intersection of high-performance, cost, and fleixbility. In a conical grinder, coffee beans are crushed and ground between two rings of burrs. They deliver a finer, much more consistent grind than you’d get with a traditional blade grinder, even the nicest blade grinder you ever met. Conicals do tend to throw off more fines than a flat burr, but many feel this leads to a more body and a more rounded flavor character.

Flat-burr grinders are more precise than conical grinders, but they’re also typically more finicky and also more expensive. Burrs are laid on top of each other, and the beans pass through them as they grind. The grinder action pushes the grounds out of one end, instead of relying on gravity like a conical-burr grinder, which means the beans spend more time in contact with the burrs. This results in a more consistent grind, down to the micron in some cases, which leads to very precise flavors. For this reason, flat-burr grinders are often preferred as a way to elicit very precise flavors form single-origin beans for pour-over, drip and Aeropress.

Blade grinders have a chopping blade that spins around like a food processor. But blades don't produce even results. Some of your coffee will be fine powder at the bottom, and at the top you'll have bits too large for even French press. The result is an inconsistent, unpredictable brew. These grinders are generally quite cheap.

But in case you're wondering, using fresh beans in a blade grinder is still way better than buying ground coffee. (You can learn how to shake the beans to even your grind just a little. Pulsing the machine often also works. See world barista champion James Hoffmann's video for some more blade grinder hacks.) Still, if you can afford it, the conical or flat-burr grinders on this list will lead to far better coffee than any blade.

What's the Difference Between a Cheap and Expensive Burr Grinder?

The machinery in a high-quality burr grinder is a bit more complicated, and it's built to withstand greater wear and tear. In cheap burr grinders, the burrs will typically get blunt from regular use, and the flimsier motors may burn out in a matter of months.

Can I Run Pre-Ground Beans Through My Burr Grinder to Get Better Coffee?

No, please don't do this.

First off, if you're trying to improve the flavor of store-bought beans, the game's already lost. One of the main reasons to use fresh-ground whole beans is to avoid oxidation, and pre-ground beans have already been cardboarded up by evil, stale air.

But also, you'll mostly just muck up your machine. Logically, it might make some sense. Your grind is too coarse, so let's just run them through again at a finer setting, and perfect coffee results! Alas, on burr grinders, preground coffee will get stuck inside the burrs, gum them up, and cause you to have to take the whole thing apart and clean it with your little brush and put it back together.

I had mixed feelings about the Opus (9/10, WIRED Recommends) when I first set it up. It's lighter than some of the other offerings in this guide, and there's more plastic in the build than I usually like. Then I turned it on. The grounds it produced at its finest setting were like double-zero flour. They were super-fine, and under a macro lens, they were remarkably consistent. That's the performance I saw with every grade of coarseness it offers—remarkable consistency.

There's another feature that's easy to overlook: it's quiet. I've tested dozens of burr grinders over the years, and this one was so hushed I almost thought it was broken. That might not seem like an important detail for a coffee grinder, but burr grinders are loud, and if you're the first one to get up in the morning, it's like hitting an alarm clock for the whole house. (KitchenAid's semi-automatic espresso machine is one of the few machines that is even quieter when grinding.) The Opus grinds quietly and cleanly and can meet your needs no matter what kind of coffee you're grinding. And it's less than $200. —Jaina Grey

I've had a regular Baratza Encore coffee grinder since plucking it off a neighbor's lawn and replacing the motor with a soldering iron. Despite its humble origins, my Encore was one of those products I couldn't bring myself to replace given its steady performance. The Baratza Encore ESP (9/10, WIRED Recommends) is a worthy upgrade. The souped-up version of the original resets the grind wheel so that it can pump out ultra-fine grinds for pressure-powered espresso while also handling coarse grinds for pour-overs and French press. The ESP's innovative dial, offering much finer adjustments for espresso, is a strong selling point on the ESP vs the top-pick Opus, whose micro-adjustments can be fiddly.

If you're thinking about replacing your Encore, upgrade to this machine which gives you a much larger range of grinds with the same simple interface and bullet-proof build quality. The Encore ESP is versatile and precise enough for any type of brewing you want to try at home and a little quieter, too: I measured it at 80 decibels. This is the rare small kitchen appliance you can count on using every day for a decade or more even as you switch from Aeropress to cold brew to Chemex and back. —Martin Cizmar

Like Liam Neeson, the Ode Gen 2 has a highly particular set of skills. It's pricey. And as with a number of flat-burr grinders, there's no espresso involved. But the Ode is a beauteous precision machine, made to elicit tuning-fork clarity of flavor from pour-over and drip and Aeropress. The size distribution on my coffee grounds can look like the blade of a knife, with few fines. Tick the Ode one setting finer, or coarser, and you'll often discover a new character, a different flavor note. It's a fun game for a mid-morning cup, when I'm down to experiment. (The Ode can also grind coarser for cold brew and French press, of course, but I'd really only need the spendy firepower of this flat burr for a slow-drip, or the sui generis cold brew on a Fellow Aiden.)

And while the previous generation Ode struggled with some of the lightest-roast pour-overs, the second-generation burr set sails through and remains beauteously static-free—you probably won't even have to water-spritz your beans like a sampler at a perfume counter. The Ode grinds quietly and diffusely, generally below 80 decibels, and preternaturally swiftly. When I first started using it, I kept double-checking to make sure it had ground all the beans so soon. It's also pretty and has ensconced itself somewhat irrevocably on my counter next to whatever drip coffee machine I happen to be trying out.

Oxo's Brew grinder has a good balance of features and usefulness and a relatively low price among the conical-burr grinders we've used. There are 15 settings that range from espresso to the coarse grind great for French press—though the lack of fine adjustments won't suffice for non-pressurized espresso baskets. You'll want the Baratza ESP for that. This Oxo is also not as quiet as our top pick.

That said, this machine is slim on your counter, and the price is right. This is flat-out the lowest-price conical-burr grinder we've found that still makes wonderfully consistent grinds, and it's a great entry-level decision at half the price of our top picks.

The precision on flat burrs is unparalleled. But usually, so is the price. This no-frills Filtro from beloved Italian coffee brand Eureka costs $80 less than our top-pick flat-burr and it's an absolute metal-clad tank of a machine, says former WIRED reviewer Jaina Grey. It's also every bit as robust as the higher-end models, and offers wonderful consistency of grind size. Sure, it's a little loud, and you have to hold the button down when you grind. But life is full of trade-offs.

Look, fresh-ground beans are always better than the stuff in the supermarket bag. And if you're not making espresso or third-wave pourover, you might not need to drop hundreds on grinder that'll deliver exquisite perfection or precision. Blade grinders like this KitchenAid won't offer the powdery fineness of a great conical, nor the precision of my top flat burr pick.

But as former WIRED reviewer Jaina Grey attests, this little KitchenAid will do its duty for years on end, at a low price, and still get you a great cup of cold brew, French press, or drip. Pro tip: Pulse it instead of holding it down for the whole grind, and your grind will be more consistent. More consistent = better.

“We live in the 21st century,” you're probably saying. “Electricity has been a pretty successful addition to modern life. Why would I want to grind coffee by hand?” The answer is precision and cost. The highest-end, most consistent, most adjustable coffee grinders can run into the thousands if you let them, especially where espresso is concerned. But a slower-grinding, precisely machined hand grinder can attain similar precision at a far lower cost. This little Taiwanese-made Kingrinder K6 is a beast, with better consistency of grind than even the best flat burrs on this list, beautiful fine adjustments, and a grind size range from the finest espresso to the coarsest of French press or cold brew. And yet, it's often $100 on sale.

Sure, it requires effort and a little grip strength. And there's a bit of a learning curve: Each click on the K6's adjustment dial accounts for 16 microns of burr movement. Start with the dial at zero, and click counterclockwise. One full rotation is 60 clicks. Great espresso might begin at around 35 clicks, while great light-roast drip coffee is somewhere closer to 110. There's a helpful guide linked here. Then weigh your beans, fill them from the top of the device, close the lid, insert the handle, and crank it for 20 seconds or so for single-dose espresso or pour-over, a fast grind compared to most manuals. One of the best cups of pour-over I've made in my life has been with this little thing, a sweet spot of precise aromatics I couldn't replicate with any electric grinder I own.

Conical-burr all rounders:

Baratza Encore for $150: Baratza's original Encore is the Honda of the conical burr grinder world: easy to maintain, runs great, easy to use, lasts forever, replacement parts easy to find. It's been on the market largely unchanged for more than a decade. For not much more, the ESP offers beautiful adjustment on espresso settings, so I tend to recommend the added versatility. But the original Encore remains a solid entry-level choice.

Baratza Virtuoso+ for $250: The Virtuoso+ uses the same burr set as the ESP, but is not quite as optimized for espresso. The biggest upgrade against the Encore ESP is a timer. Both have similar rock-solid but compact builds (although the Virtuoso is a little more stylish with its fitted grounds bin), 40 grind settings, and burr grinders for consistent grounds. The Virtuoso’s digital timer, however, is great for those wanting consistent coffee ground dosings each morning. You’ll have to dial in on your grind time versus coffee grounds output, but once you figure that out, you can walk away from the grinder and multitask if you please. —Tyler Shane

Oxo Brew Conical Burr Grinder With Scale for $285: Making great coffee consistently is all about measuring your variables, and this Oxo model comes with a built-in scale. Set your grind size, select the weight you want, hit Start, and walk away; it shuts itself off when it's done. This is a great way to streamline your morning ritual, but the device does spray off a few grounds—and at its price range, we tend to prefer the Fellow Opus or Baratza ESP as an all-rounder.

KitchenAid Burr Grinder for $200: This KitchenAid is stylish and easy to clean, according to former WIRED reviewer Jaina Grey, and the burrs are accessible thanks to their placement directly beneath the hopper. It also features precise dose control, with grind size controlled by a dial. For espresso lovers, one excellent feature is that you can swap the little container that catches the grounds with a holder for a portafilter.

Flat burrs for drip and pour-over:

Wilfa Uniform for $349: This Wilfa has long been on our list as a great flat-burr grinder for pour-overs and drip. It remains such, though the Ode springboarded it as the top pick with its Gen 2 burr update, at about the same price. Like its name suggests, the Wilfa offers a beautifully consistent grind size and will make you a lovely pour-over. That said, it's a little fussier to adjust and louder than the Ode.

Baratza Vario W+ for $600: The Encore has a bigger, beefier, flat burr cousin, the Baratza Vario-W+ (7/10, WIRED Recommends) with a built-in scale and ridiculously granular adjustment (230 settings!). But like a lot of flat burrs, it struggles on finer grinds, according to WIRED contributor Joe Ray. And static is an issue. With price in play, the Ode Gen 2 comes out on top, but Ray was still a big fan of the Vario.

For travel and camping:

VSSL Java manual grinder for $148: VSSL specializes in ultra-durable camping tools, and applied this same durable construction to this hardy campsite-ready hand grinder that WIRED reviewer Scott Gilbertson attests to be rugged enough to survive the zombie apocalypse. The handle folds out to provide a lot of leverage while you grind, and you can use it as a hook to hang the device up when you're done.

DmofwHi Cordless Grinder for $31: Going camping in the actual woods but don't feel like working too hard by hand-grinding to get a cup? Here you go. The DmofwHi grinder is a solid little blade grinder that's wireless and rechargeable (via USB-C), and you can grind enough coffee for about 15 to 18 pots of coffee on a single charge. It's a blade grinder, don't expect espresso. But for some roadside drip, Turkish or cowboy? Have fun.

Aarke Flat-Burr Grinder for $370: This pretty, shiny, stainless steel Aarke grinder contains a unique feature when paired with Aarke's coffee brewer, detecting the water in the brewer's tank and grinding the appropriate amount of beans. But this feature wasn't as calibrated as we'd like, and there have been a lot of online reports of grinder jams. I didn't have the same problem, but at more than $300 for a grinder that hasn't been long on the market, prudence is often rewarded.

Hario Skerton Pro for $50: The Hario Skerton was the gateway hand grinder for many a coffee nerd, but has since given ground to newer entrants. It's fast and cheap, but it'll give you a heck of a workout and isn't as consistent for coarse grinds, plus the silicone handle has a habit of falling off.

Hario Mini-Slim Plus for $37: This smaller Hario is slower than the Skerton, but its plastic construction makes it good to throw in a travel bag—and the low price is another reason you'll feel safe carting it around.

Cuisinart Burr Grinder for $60: At first, it seems like a good deal. It's Cuisinart, a known brand, and a conical burr grinder for less than $100! But former WIRED reviewer Jaina Grey found that the low price came with a cost: These things burn out faster than a rock star in the late '60s.

Bodum Bistro Electric Blade Grinder for $20: This little blade grinder is quite cheap, and the model has served WIRED contributing reviewer Tyler Shane for years. That said, after some inconsistent reports on durability, we favor the KitchenAid as our budget pick.

Breville Smart Grinder Pro for $200: WIRED has recommended this Breville in the past for its accessible burrs that make it easy to clean. But ever since Breville bought Baratza, they've slowly been swapping out the grinders in their excellent top-line semi-automatic espresso machines with those excellent Baratza burrs. For a standalone grinder, we give the same advice.

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