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Comment by locuscoeruleus | Hacker News Reader

If you want consistency that grinder is going to cost a lot. There are diminishing returns and $60 grinder will get you 80% of the way. But going from 80% to 99% you're looking at a price increase of about $1800. You're obviously not going to buy that equipment for your home though.

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Who are you kidding? Of course we are. I have a $2000 grinder on the way.

Edit: I don't buy that a $60 dollar grinder will get you 80% of the way. The output of such cheap grinders that I have seen have very poor consistency. You're looking at low hundreds to get anything decent and even then you will have very clear differences when matched against a top end grinder.

On the continuum from preground coffee to cafe quality pour over, a $60 wilfa burr griner will get you 80% in my opinion. You'll have days when the brew comes out very well, some days it's disappointing. The biggest advantage when going from no grinder to cheap grinder is that you can buy quality beans rather than supermarket coffee and that time from grinding to brewing is minimized, so you lose less flavour. For me, that's 80% of the value for 20% of the effort/money.

Ah, ok sure. I agree.

> I don't buy that a $60 dollar grinder will get you 80% of the way.

Is a used Baratza Encore much more expensive than that? A new one is US$ 140:

* https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/the-best-coffee-grinder/

Honestly for pour over methods I think a Baratza Encore or similar is plenty fine and will get you probably 90% of the way. For coffee snobs like me and you, maybe that is only 50% :).

Obviously espresso is completely different, and agreed, you'd have to be at the mid-hundreds to get to a barely good-enough starting point.

I'm using something like $20 grinder I guess, I bought it 15 years ago and it works fine for me.

That said, I prefer to buy grinded coffee. It's not perfect, but miles ahead of instant coffee. That's perfect combination of time/price/taste for me.

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