What is your budget?

If you don’t have much money to spend then the Timemore C2 is often available for around $50. Around $100 there are the Kingrinder K0 and Timemore C3. Getting into the $150 are the Kingrinder K6 and some grinders from 1Zpresso.

If you have to have electric then don’t buy anything cheaper than a Baratza Encore.

I picked up a 1zpresso jx-pro a couple years ago for around $80 new. I don’t know if that’s something you would consider to be “too expensive” but it works quite well. Grinding 15g of beans takes seconds and seems to produce consistent grinds.

I like my kingrinder, quick and consistent. It is manual but mine came with parts to hook up a drill if one doesn’t like manual.

Manual grinders aren’t bad, unless you go for the cheap ones. For example, my Comandante grinder has a steel conical burr, but most of the cheaper ones come with ceramic. The thing is, the thing’s sharp, I could actually cut myself if I wasn’t careful during cleaning, opposed to the ceramic burrs that are pretty blunt (from what I’ve heard, never had one). That makes grinding coffee a breeze (maybe 20-30secs for ~13grams for a cup of coffee), even on finer settings, also it introduces less dust, as it doesn’t crush the beans but cuts them into fine bits. There are many models of manual grinders that come with great burrs, some of are of the Chinese make if price is an issue (1zpresso for example).

Flat burrs are an electric grinder thing. The mechanics of grinding with those is a little different than with conical ones, but the result is pretty much the same. Electric grinders can come with both conical or flat burrs. I’ve got an absolute overkill of a grinder meant for commercial use, bought used for around $300. The thing is a beast, takes less than 5secs for ~20g of coffee. I wouldn’t suggest you get one (Mazzer Super Jolly FYI), just because of its size, but anything with that kind of build quality is likely gonna last you a literal lifetime. There are some more reasonably sized consumer electric grinders though, I heard Wilfa Svart is decent, some other might be fine as well.

I like my: CUISINART Coffee Grinder, Electric Burr One-Touch Automatic Grinder with18-Position Grind Selector, Stainless Steel, DBM-8P1 Going on year 4 now!

I was looking for a grinder a while back and wanted a burr grinder but wasn’t looking to break the bank. I was recommended, and ultimately bought, a Timemore C2.

It’s been great! I tend to grind a couple weeks worth at a time and it’s not tiring to use at all. It washes up easy and you can adjust the grind based on application. I go more coarse in the summer when grinding for cold brew for my wife.

I’m not in the coffee scene much so I don’t know their reputation, as always ymmv.

Depends on what you’re looking for. Do you want drip? Espresso? French press? Manual ? Electric? What’s your budget?

For cheap/low quality electric grinders, most of them are blade grinders: they chop up the beans in very rough sizes, take forever, sound like they’re gonna explode and make terrible coffee. Don’t bother, they’re shit.

Burr grinders come in 2 main “cutting technologies”, conical and flat. Conicals are mostly found on manual grinders, entry level electrics and some medium to high end ones. Flats are much more common on the medium to high end range because they tend to need much more torque and therefore powerful motors. As for the differences between the topologies, it mostly comes down to particle size distribution and the effects it has. Conicals tend to emphasize texture (think thick, syrupy espresso), flats tend to emphasize clarity (flavors tend to be more easily to discern). But they exist in a continuum and burr shape alone is definitely not the only factor.

As for actual recommendations, take a look at James Hoffman’s and Lance Hedrick’s channels on youtube, they have a lot of incredible advice on all kinds of grinders, among other coffee equipment. Be warned though, it’s a very deep rabbit hole :D

My main grinder is a DF64/G-Iota (~400€), and is an absolute workhorse. It’s a mid-range grinder that can be very easily modded to rival grinders more than twice its price, takes standard 64mm flat burrs and can be upgraded with super expensive SSP burrs. I love it. I think the current generation corrected many flaws I had to mod out of mine.

My travel grinder is a conical manual 1-ZPresso J-Max (~150€) that’s so quick it can grind at espresso range at almost 1g/s, with excellent results.

Attempting to ask similar question:

I do cold brew but haven’t found a grinder that give a consistent grind that’s coarse enough.

My current method is to grind as coarse as I can, and then run through a fine mesh sieve. Even then, I end up with a good amount of grounds making it through the mesh container I use for soaking.

Is there a go-to grinder people like for cold brewing?

i obtained a coffee grinder from IKEA 2-3 years ago. Somehow i feel like i shoplifted it even though I paid it for it… they were out of coffee grinders so I surreptitiously removed the “I be IKEA” tags and made them look it up at checkout. My fuckin ex broke the glass french press, just like my loser brother did to my double wall German one 10 years ago. I’m over it. I do not have to grind for 5-10 minutes or harm myself to make coffee.

The grinding mechanism is important, because what you’re looking for is consistency: the grounds should optimally be the same granularity. Flat burr grinders ensure this. I have a less expensive KitchenAid burr grinder that works just fine; they don’t mave the model I have, anymore, but this seems like the current iteration.

“I mainly want to get a coffee grinder because beans have a longer shelf life and are cheaper.”

Bruh…

If that's your goal for now, buy cheapest conical bur you can find (even if you are a hot and black kind of coffee person, there's just no reason to disrespect the beans with anything else).  I think your reasons for wanting to grind may evolve with time and you can reassess your goals and options at that time. 

After my weeks of research and reading reviews, I determined that the Encore ESP is the best value due to the finer adjustments for dialing in the grind size for espresso. However, I am in the states and not sure how much this costs where you are.

I make espresso maybe twice a year, and really wanted a single grinder that does fine grinding for the few times I need it.

The standard encore should be fine as well, but I don’t have experience with it. Don’t forget your spritzer for wetting the beans before grinding. Also, the encore is not zero retention so you should figure out a way to get those last few grinds out, I picked up the bellow attachment for the hopper, but I think there are other solutions.

Good luck and remember, you’ll be with whatever grinder you choose for a while (unless it breaks) so imagine your future coffee usage as well.

The cheapest electric grinder you should get is Baratza Encore. That’s pretty much it. Options open if you double your price budget (which is a huge ask and.not reasonable for many, don’t worry)

The cheapest hand grinders you should get (unless you really have no budget) are the 1zpresso Q2 (single cups of coffee) or a Timemore C3 for pourovers. They are at least the quality of the baratza encore if not slightly better without modifications to the baratza. It literally takes me 30 seconds to grind through 16g of beans. It is night and day from those cheap shitty amazon grinder and also affordable.

Just don’t buy from amazon. Amazon sucks, in unethical, puts smaller companies out of business not because it is better, but because it uses its immense wealth to directly copy products but make them worse and sell them at a large loss while losing a ton of money until the smaller company folds then jack up their prices. They also fund illegal Union busting, barely pay even a fraction of their taxes, and use their software side of the company to lock in people and other companies. Not to mention their workers’ rights and OSHA safety violations of which are many. They are just untouchable because they have a Disney-tier legal division.