Comment by slowmovintarget | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slowmovintarget | Hacker News Reader

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slowmovintarget

It's not easy, but it can be done.

We found Miele for dishwashers. Zwilling for our toaster, JennAir for microwave...

We explicitly avoided "smart" anything. I shouldn't need to connect my refrigerator to wi-fi.

But we've watched the crap curve take hold on a bunch of product categories, especially U.S. brands. Hannah Anderson used to make good quality, reliable children's clothes that didn't wear out when you looked at them funny. Not any more. Other brands that used to make clothing that lasted 20+ years now makes thin garbage that might last a season. Many of these transitions were to "Made in China" manufacturing.

We went to replace a ten-year old electric coffee grinder and couldn't find one for less than $1700 that wasn't garbage. We switched to a hand grinder as the only reasonable alternative.

It is very frustrating to try to find things that will last. My parents bought one refrigerator, and it lasted for more than 30 years. Most of their stuff they were able to get once. Not every two or three years.

I must disagree on the coffee grinder front. There's a great number of decent options well under your given price (I just took the plunge recently).

Brands like Ceado and Eureka make a bunch at various price ranges. 600 gets you a decent one, 1200 and you're well into very nice grinder territory (unless you wanna go all audiophile here).

There's not a ton to go wrong: good motor, bearings, a well designed adjustment mechanism and a good hopper design. Of those I'd really only expect the bearings and motor to die in any reasonable time frame.

If you're that concerned you could always get a commercial model. There's no way home use will kill one of those, but it'll just be big and impractical.

We landed on commercial coffee grinders for any with motors. The hand mill we ended up with does much better for pour-over coffee than any of the electrics at roughly a tenth of the price and counter space. Only requires elbow-grease and some good hand-torque.

Can I leverage your research for myself...Which hand grinder did you go with?

I'm not sure what the parent uses but I really enjoy using my Comandante Mark IV (which solves some issues with Mark III had, namely around body design). It's high quality, reliable, and consistent, and also easy to maintain since there's only a few parts that need cleaning. There are also a range of colors if you want something more eye popping. For me the only downside (besides price, it's around €275) is that I find the large logo on the side a little gaudy, but in practice it's not that bad.

The Commandante is one of the ones we would have purchased, though it wasn't available when the pandemic was in full swing. The one that I ended up with was the BPlus Apollo hand-grinder (made in Taiwan).

Very sturdy, easy to use, easy to clean, and surprisingly quiet.

Random review: https://www.home-barista.com/blog/bplus-apollo-hand-grinder-...

The Kinu m47 was unavailable (fire in the factory, pandemic...).

Went with the BPlus Apollo. See my response below to yaldiz.

I do like a good hand grinder, used one for years (Commandante) until I got lazy and wanted a machine to do the work.

The 20$ coffee grinder I got at target years ago still runs great...

I have one of those, newer than that, and the bearings are going out.

Has there been a change in Baratzza? The Virtuoso I bought a decade ago is built like a tank and has replacement parts available for consumables.

The one weakness it has is the plastic ring that holds the upper burr set. This appears to be intentionally designed to break as a sacrificial part if anything jams. Replacements are a few bucks.

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