Another thing is grinders too apparently. I watched a video once explaining why espresso machines are so expensive and they said they'd rather have a $700 espresso machine with an expensive grinder than a $4000 machine with a cheap grinder.

While it is true that a $4000 espresso machine will not get good results with a $20 blade grinder from the hardware store, I think you do see diminishing returns going above $1000 for burr grinders. On the other hand, spending more on the espresso machine can get you way more dials and knobs to tweak. Temperature and pressure profiling and all that.

This may not matter if you prefer medium or dark roasted coffee, but light and Nordic roasts really benefit from the extra control over temperature and pressure. With a fancy machine you can do these very long, lower pressure extractions with higher brew ratios to extract a finicky light roast which would otherwise require an impossibly fine grind that chokes a standard 9 bar machine.

> With a fancy machine you can do these very long, lower pressure extractions with higher brew ratios to extract a finicky light roast which would otherwise require[…]

Or a simple machine, like a (direct-)lever[0], which is an operator controlling a piston pushing water.

[0] like a La Pavoni, or Cremina - this video is of a europicolla owner who I think embodies well the joy that can be had matching a machine like this to the right person https://youtu.be/1BGB2i4Bu58

My next machine is going to be a lever machine for sure! Though I will say that a direct lever machine is the ultimate tradeoff of control over precision/repeatability. Spring levers give you a ton of control with more precision because you're retarding the lever to subtract from the maximum pressure of the spring rather than modulating your muscle power in real time. Unfortunately, what the simple lever machines give you in terms of pressure control, they take away in temperature control. Getting accurate, repeatable temperature shots from a La Pavoni is a bit of a black art, and the group can easily overheat, requiring you to cool it down before making coffee.

Even in the case of lever machines, you get more control if you spend more money. Take a high-end lever machine like the ACS Vesuvius Evo Levo [1]. This machine has an 11-bar dual spring group (which you can back off to your heart's content by retarding the lever) and a pump to provide selectable preinfusion between 1.5 and 5 bar. It also has 3 independently controlled (PID) heaters: 1 in the coffee boiler, 1 in the steam/service boiler, and 1 in the group itself. This allows you to do temperature profiling by, for example, setting a higher temperature in the group than in the coffee boiler, which will cause the slightly cooler water from the boiler to bring down the temperature of the group during the extraction.

[1] https://www.elcor.it/en/vesuvius-evo-leva-en/

> My next machine is going to be a lever machine for sure!

Nice - I've been a Cremina operator for the last few years, thoroughly enjoy it.

> Spring levers give you a ton of control with more precision [...]

At the expense of feedback. And to be fair and clear, most of my experience is with a direct lever, and I like it, but I'd happily have a spring lever too if I had the space.

To move things away from strictly hard-tech and measurement though, all this is also so experiential that I'm happy to keep things low-tech and manual, to degrees. My morning coffee routine is fantastically quiet for example: this doesn't (directly) affect the quality of the coffee, but I sure appreciate the experience. And the experience of being in charge of the pressure at the puck - a different way of being involved where I'm interacting with the differences in grind settings, or one bean/roast vs another...

Good luck in your lever-machine quest!

I totally appreciate the low tech approach. I think my dream machine is an Elektra MCAL!

Do you use a manual grinder as well? I’ve never used one but they seem rather clumsy to me. Maybe one of those old fashioned ones that mount firmly to the table and have a big brass crank and brass hardware with a wood case!

> Do you use a manual grinder as well?

I have, in my life - I associate them with pour-overs (V60, Chemex) for myself. In my espresso setup, I have an electric variable-speed single-dose conical burr unit. It’s naturally fairly quiet, and I run it at ~30rpm so about all I hear is bean crushing/grinding.

That sounds pretty nice! I have a Niche Zero and it's fairly unobtrusive, but still somewhat loud. At least it doesn't have any high frequency noise though.

I haven’t personally used a Niche, but have studied them a bit and think they might be a high water mark in the performance/$. A busy cafe I frequent uses them commercially (modified, for extra cooling) with success.

> I think you do see diminishing returns going above $1000 for burr grinders.

This is absolutely correct: the best "value" is a $200-300 hand grinder. Anything more than that you're adding quality of life (mostly), and sometimes even taking away from quality of coffee while increasing price.

Of course, hand grinders are generally pretty annoying to use for all your coffee needs. They are great but it's also great to use something electric.

I often hear the priority list being

  1. Quality of beans
  2. Quality of the grinder
  3. Quality of the espresso machine

I'm not exactly sure what sets apart some grinder from another. Some say they more evenly grind the beans (similar particle sizes) but I am not sure if that is all there is to it.

> I'm not exactly sure what sets apart some grinder from another. Some say they more evenly grind the beans (similar particle sizes) but I am not sure if that is all there is to it.

Definitely not all there is to it. There are people who are in to swapping burrs on a grinder to experiment with different flavor profiles, or to make espresso vs filter coffee. Some grinders even cater to us, such as the Niche Duo: https://www.nichecoffee.co.uk/products/niche-duo?variant=431...

Also, some people who like more traditional, chocolaty espressos prefer grinders/burrs that produce more varied particle size. People who like cleaner, "modern" espresso prefer grinders that produce the more similar particle sizes.

It's a rabbit hole.

Random: is the Niche Duo made by a US company?

Asking, as I noticed the power switch on the side: the "|" symbol was at the top, which doesn't jive with the UK's "up is off, down is on" typical switch.

Interesting, that never occurred to me. Niche are a UK company, the grinders are designed in the UK, but as I understand, made in China.

I'd put the quality of the grinder above the quality of the beans, but that's assuming a certain minimum standard (e.g. whole beans from a supermarket brand).

If someone's using a blade grinder, then the particle size are going to be all over the place and you end up with a brew that's both over-extracted and under-extracted at the same time.

I'm not especially fussed about the espresso machine quality as I usually drink AeroPress coffee and as long as people aren't using boiling water, then it turns out fine (full immersion is a lot easier to get right than dialing in the specific grind for Espresso).

A high quality grinder also minimally heats the beans as they grind - heat can change the volatility of the oils, resulting in changed flavor (and usually not for the better)

Correct, this is why people prefer burr mill grinders made of ceramic instead of metal since ceramic is more thermally insulating.

This isn't true in the high-end coffee community. No one uses ceramic burrs, and they are generally considered to produce worse coffee than other burrs.

Yes, and part of that is just preventing waste and saving work - I mean a blade grinder can get you a quantity of relatively consistent grounds after you sift them, regrind some, sift to separate, use the paper towel trick, etc., and now you have like a 30% return out of the beans you destroyed, and a pile of coffee dust and splinters. The amount of work saved by a good grinder and amount of waste reduced is worth a fair amount. I’m not sure $1000 grinder gives me commensurate value personally, but a $100-300 grinder I can travel with? That sounds quite fair even just being slightly down the coffee nerd rabbit hole. :)

> but not in the fridge

I thought that storing them in fridge will keep them fresh longer

freezer yes, fridge idk.