Baratza Sette 270 Conical Burr Coffee Grinder

Would leave 4.5 stars if I could.I’ve paired this with my Gaggia Classic Pro—a very good combo for making cafe-quality espresso at home. I’m a total novice and have spent weeks getting educated via YouTube and tons of websites, and going through bags of coffee getting it all dialed in through trial and error. It took a LOT of learning and plenty of mediocre shots, some gnarly channeling, and several supplemental purchases that I first assumed were unnecessary (bottomless portafilter, WDT tool, distributor, puck screen and scale that can weigh to 0.1g. It does really help to have these!) But I am now pulling shots that are better than anything I’ve ever had at any cafe. Deep, balanced flavor, perfect body, rich golden crema.The grinder is without question the most important add-on for the espresso machine. Simply put, your $100 burr grinder—even if it has an espresso/Turkish setting—isn’t going to be able to produce a fine enough grind for a Gaggia or any such prosumer-grade espresso machine. And the “espresso” pre-ground coffee you can buy at the grocery isn’t even close. Your local cafe might grind for you, but even then, they won’t be able to dial it in to exactly the right fineness. If your goal is to make real espresso at home, you need a grinder of this caliber.This machine can grind extremely fine—it comes with a shim that you can install to go even finer. I was able to grind fine enough without installing the shim: fine enough to actually stop the Gaggia’s 9 bars of pressure, and I’ve still got several increments finer I could go on the settings. I understand that as the burrs settle in, I may have to adjust it finer, but for now I don’t foresee needing the shim.The settings are intuitive and easy to dial in: just move in small increments and accept that you will waste quite a bit of coffee (and you want to use the actual beans you plan to drink—every time you switch beans, you’ll need to dial in anew). Each one-letter tweak to the smaller microadjust dial seems to equal about 3 seconds in extraction time for me.As others have noted, this grinder is LOUD. Like, wake up the household loud. So if you’re the early riser in the family and want to grind fresh each morning (which is strongly recommended), then you might need to keep this in the garage or basement. :)Also, while you’ll see reviews saying this grinder has no retention, that has not been my experience. Not a big problem once you’ve landed on the grind size you plan to keep—if there’s gram or so of day-old coffee in the mix, who cares? But if you’re still in the process of dialing it in, you want all the coffee to be at the same fineness, so you’ll want to “purge” it (just let it run for a second or so and then toss that coffee) before grinding your next batch.Finally, this is the less expensive version that has time settings rather than a built in scale. I’ll say this: espresso making is a precision art, where you’re dialing in exact grind, dosage, and extraction time. You want to get your dosage measured to the tenth of a gram consistently every time so you can control the extraction. I find the timing feature to be totally worthless—the only way I know to get the dosage just right is to use a scale. Especially with the retention mentioned above, 10 seconds’ output one day might be a gram or two different from 10 seconds the next. I found a small scale fits at the base of the grinder—I zero out a cup to grind into and just grind right into that. You get a feel for when to push “stop” to minimize coffee waste, then spoon out the few tenths of a gram of excess before pouring into the portafilter. I don’t think you’ll find a better way than this to be precise and consistent.You probably won’t find a more capable grinder at this price point that has this degree of fine-tuning adjustability. Strongly recommended! Just be aware of its (few) shortcomings—that you’d probably need to spend several hundred more to eliminate.

Great

SOLUTION:1 - static is solved with fine misting of whole beans after weighing. Just one squirt is enough, I think.2 - weigh beans (1 or 2 cup quantity anyway) using lid of grinder to weigh AND mist beans. I originally used separate plastic container to spray into then realized I already had the perfect container to use for spraying up to maybe 2 cups of weighed beans.OLD REVIEW:For over a year I never had static problems to speak of. Now I cannot get rid of grounds sticking to almost everything.Turns out the receptacle is made of "anti-static plastic" BUT it no longer is anti static.For what it's worth, the manual for the Sette 270 is easily found for a search: "SETTE™ 270 MANUAL". That's where I found the info about the receptacle. The idea is that's enough to prevent static problems. But I am sure that's not enough because grounds stick to everywhere, not just inside the receptacle.TIP: mostly people say to spray a fine mist or two of water onto beans before grinding. I use a cheap (small) dedicated mister, put measured beans in a bowl (NOT into the receptacle which needs to stay dry), spray once or twice, stir for just a second with hand, put into grinder and grind. It works well, even for oily dark roast.

I ordered this item and received it in a timely manner. The specific reason I ordered this model and brand, was that a previous coffee grinder (another brand), died - mainly because grinds kept getting stuck in the chute... This grinder, has no "chute" - the grinds pouring directly into a container or puck without having to travel through any sort of angled chute.Now here's the fun part: When I unpacked and put the grinder together, and threw some beans in to grind - it wasn't grinding them - at all - not even on the coarsest setting. I dumped the beans back into their canister, and then took a few, put them in the hopper, and using a flashlight, watched the grinding process... The beans were jumping around while the grinder whirred away - but nothing was getting ground.I'm a former aircraft electrician - and I'm very familiar with how electric motors - both AC and DC - work. Something made me decide to go and open the unit up. I noted the motor was a DC motor. Well, DC motors specifically work in one direction if + and - leads are wired one way, and the other direction if they're wired the other way. I went ahead and reversed the red and black wires that connected to the DC motor, put it back together, and tried again: VIOLA! It worked - and it WORKED AMAZINGLY WELL!Overall, I love this grinder. It's fast. It's sleek. It's not overly large and doesn't take a lot of counter space. It is, however, noisy... But man, does it grind. Took less than 2 minutes to grind enough coffee to fill a 1-lb coffee canister.Now, if YOU run into this problem, here's how you can fix it - you'll know it's not grinding because nothing - at all, will come out the bottom of the grinder. NOTHING. If you put just four or five beans in, reattach the hopper so you can watch them (make sure it's "open" so you can see into the grind chamber), and just see them jumping around, your motor is probably wired backwards. To fix this: 1st, and foremost: UNPLUG THE UNIT! You'll need a #9 TORX screwdriver - that's really small, but not the smallest by any means. Flip the unit over (after emptying it), and pull the three rear-most rubber feet. Unscrew the three torx screws that are under them. At the front of the unit - at the top - as you're looking at it from the bottom, are two torx screws - left and right. Remove them too. Now push at top of the unit (from the top side) and pry gently at the bottom of the unit near the back at the seam. The back/top should slide/pop off. Be careful. There are two wires for the button that detects the hopper is locked in place that connect this piece back to the main body. You should now see the motor clearly. There will be a black and a red wire wired to it. Reverse them. Put the unit back together by carefully sliding the notched top piece back to the top of the body, and pressing the bottom back to the body. Put the screws back in. Attach the hopper, and put a few beans in. Make sure you have a container to catch the grind. Go ahead and give it a whirl. If it grinds, then you've fixed your problem.One shouldn't have to know electrical motors to get a $400 grinder to work, but this could happen with any company by accident. Quality Control is a MUST if you have a company that makes anything like this. If this company had a good QC program, they'd have caught this mistake before it went out the door. Just grind three or four beans and make sure the unit actually grinds them.While I'm disappointed I had to go to the trouble of tearing this machine down to fix the motor issue - overall, other than that, I'm happy. I give the grinder, now that it's working, FIVE stars, but the fact that I had to tear it down to reverse the motor leads, is equal to ONE STAR. Adding in the speed, grind settings, ease of teardown (as a consumer, you can replace every part just by contacting the company and ordering what you need), and the compact size, are all FIVE STARS. It gets THREE stars for noisiness. The quality of the plastic hopper seems flimsy - so THREE STARS for that. The quality of the catch bin also feels cheep, but I give it FOUR STARS because it doesn't seem as flimsy as the hopper.FINAL RATING:1 - QC Issue/Motor Wired in Reverse5 - Speed/Ease of use5 - Grind settings5 - Ease of teardown/repair5 - Size/Compactness3 - Noise/Quietness4 - Overall QualityOVERALL SCORE: 4 out of 5.V/RMarc