HG one Grinder

naithaddi

Anybody heard about the HG one coffee grinder? Is it worth the investment? It's about a thousand bucks.

aaron.c.schroeder

Hard question to answer - depends on budget, experience with coffee, etc. I haven't used one, but I've wanted to buy it for awhile and have done some research on its pros and cons.

Basically, coffee/espresso burr grinders come in two varieties: conical and flat. Flat burr grinders are cheaper to produce largely because they require smaller motors for electric versions than conical burr grinders. However, flat burr grinders are not thought to produce as uniform a grind as conical burr grinders, and uniformity of grind is the entire function of your grinder. From some perspectives, this is a problem at the margins: the best coffee shops in the country use giant, incredibly expensive ($3000-$6000) conical burr grinders, but most very good coffee shops 'make due' with flat burr grinders.

Several years ago, Orphan Espresso introduced the hand-cranked Pharos, which paved the way for a number of entries into the home-market for conical burr grinders. In principle, the Pharos offers the exact same quality as any conical burr grinder but shaves several thousand from the price by eliminating the motor. There is a lot of demand for these grinders (witness how quickly they're snapped up on coffee forums like CoffeeGeek and Home Barista), owing to their one-at-a-time production by a home-based engineering team. Then there was Versalab's "M" series of grinders, which offers a kind of hybrid conical/flat style grind which again offered the quality of a conical grinder, but reintroduced the motor at a more consumer friendly price of ~$1500.

The HG One is, more or less, the mid-point of these two styles of grinders. It's more expensive than the Pharos, but it's much easier to get and it appears to deal with several ease-of-use issues that most Pharos users experience. Also, it looks better on your counter (arguably). Compared to the Versalab, it's quite simply cheaper, but the grind quality and styles are purportedly the same.

So, there you go. If you're pretty far into coffee and espresso as a hobby, you're going to want a conical grinder, which will cost you anywhere from $300 for a used Pharos up to $2500 for a tricked-out Versalab (or other brand, including Mazzer). The HG One has always struck me as a nice compromise between the positives and negatives of those 'extremes'.