Good price for a burr grinder. For espresso on a tight budget, it's hard to beat. Small footprint.
Negative Product Points
Push-button switch needs to be held down continuously to grind. Noisy (my wife can't stand the sound). No gearing, so high speed of burrs heats up grounds far too much. Terrible static - grounds stick to the inside of the collector and anything else they come into contact with. Prone to blockage when fine grind is used.
Detailed Commentary
I bought this machine when I was still playing with a steam toy 'espresso' machine. It's the cheapest burr grinder I've seen in the UK. After upgrading to a budget Gaggia pump machine, I was able to produce pretty reasonable espresso with this combination.
The grinder will easily grind fine enough to choke my machine, and the uniformity of the grind is reasonable. When it's working well you can achieve fairly consistent results.
Because of the lack of gearing, the ground coffee exits the grinder hot, and highly charged with static. It then sticks to the sides of the transparent plastic hopper, and is a bit of a pain to extract. I found the grinder very messy to use, as the static tends to spread the finely ground coffee around and make it stick to everything it touches.
I mostly used this grinder with dark-roast, pretty oily beans and I think this may be why I found it so prone to blockage. I found the only reliable way of unblocking the grinder to poke the end of a spoon into the aperture from which the coffee grounds exit, and unclog the rotating fins which extract the coffee. It's a messy business, and I have wasted a lot of coffee this way. It's also time consuming, and I have left the house on more than one occasion frustrated at having spent time fiddling with the grinder instead of enjoying a cup of coffee for breakfast.
I've now upgraded to a Gaggia MDF. That's not perfect either, but in my view the improvement in usability and build quality makes it worth every extra penny.
Buying Experience
I bought this grinder from my favourite department store in the UK. They didn't have a clue what they were selling, but smiled nicely so it could have been worse.
