Our weekend breakfast ritual usually includes a carefully prepared cup of coffee made with freshly ground coffee beans. The first coffee grinder I ever purchased was a pretty cheap $20 USD grinder from Krups (this one), which I used mostly for French press or single-serve pour-over. The Krups was quick and compact but the result was always inconsistent.

Eventually my husband and I switched to a six-cup Chemex. It didn’t take long for us to decide that we wanted to graduate up to a grinder that could produce a more consistently coarse grind. But we weren’t quite ready (nor did we want to shell out the cash) to go all-in on an electric counter top grinder. So in early 2015 we upgraded from the Krups to a hand-crank Hario Skerton Ceramic Coffee Mill (100g), which retails at a reasonable ~$40 USD.

The Hario Skerton was a vast improvement over the Krups. The grinds are much more consistently sized, but man can the thirty minutes of hand-grinding put a damper on an otherwise lazy Sunday morning. It took two years of (un)happily hand-grinding before we decided to upgrade again. Continue reading →