The best professional coffee grinders

For most users, coffee grinders are a daily addition to enjoy the unmistakable taste and aroma of freshly ground coffee and little else. Espresso enthusiasts know that extracting the perfect coffee to your taste depends on the grind. Our article today is aimed at this last sector of the public, in which we will find out everything you need to know to buy a professional electric coffee grinder with guarantees.

Professional coffee grinders have nothing to do with domestic ones. They are electric grinders, which have some unavoidable factors in common:

  • They are very powerful and are designed to withstand many daily services.
  • They are very expensive.
  • They allow you to regulate the grinding with much greater precision, sometimes with micrometric adjustment (not with predefined degrees).

Naturally, when you buy a professional coffee grinder, you must be very clear about what you want it for. This type of grinder is also used in cafeterias and catering businesses. If you have a professional coffee machine, you will also need one of these grinders:

As you can see: only suitable for those who are willing to invest more money in the coffee grinder than in the coffee machine, or for those who own hotel business and need to grind fast and well continuously.

Differences between a professional and a home coffee grinder

If you want to buy a professional grinder from Amazon, you will notice at first sight that there is a fundamental difference: the price. We will talk about it later.

But what factors justify this price increase when buying a professional electric grinder at Amazon? Are they prettier? Are they from a better-known brand? Are they bigger or smaller? Well, no… obviously, the differences between a professional coffee grinder and one more focused on domestic use are mainly functional.

  • Greater capacity: a professional electric coffee grinder is designed to grind many times and very frequently throughout the day. This means that the hopper is large, so that you can store a large amount of beans inside it without having to continually refill it. Note: this also means that professional coffee grinders are usually larger (take up more space) than normal ones.
  • More power: when preparing espressos (which is the most popular thing in cafés and also the type of coffee that justifies the purchase of such an expensive grinder) it is essential to achieve a very fine grinding. Many household electric grinders do not achieve sufficient fineness, even in the lowest thicknesses. A professional grinder will necessarily be more powerful, and therefore also noisier and more consumer friendly.
  • Greater precision: the essential characteristic of a professional grinder, which is usually designed to grind coffee for espresso, is that it can achieve a very fine grind, and at the same time be adapted for other preparations. So professional grinders allow you to set up many more grinding grades or thicknesses than domestic ones.

How much does a manual coffee grinder cost:

Commercial coffee mills are not really divided into “professional” and “domestic”. You don’t go to a shop and find normal grinders on one side and professional grinders on the other. There is no fixed or pre-marked barrier. But there is one thing that can be taken into account, in this case, and it never fails: price.

There is a big difference in price between a normal grinder and a professional one.

The prices of professional coffee grinders usually (by far, sometimes) exceed 200 pounds. Some semi-professional ones, which we could call high-end electric grinders (domestic, but high-end), can be around 150 or 175 pounds, but not much cheaper.

So you know what you have to invest if you want to buy a professional coffee grinder at Amazon. By taking a look at the galleries that adorn this article, you can get a better idea of the prices we are dealing with.

The best brands of professional coffee grinders

It isn’t easy to talk about which is the best brand of professional coffee grinders, and the reason is none other than their exclusivity. In some countries, there are not many firms that market such exclusive grinders, and those that do usually have only one model in their catalogue.

For this reason, we will only talk about these three companies as the best brands of professional coffee grinders: they are the only ones that register a catalogue of several different models at Amazon.

  • Baratza
  • Mahlkönig
  • Eureka

Baratza coffee grinders

Baratza is possibly the best known professional grinder manufacturer with the greatest presence on the market, above all, thanks to its two most basic grinders, the Encore and the Virtuoso. But if we want to buy a Baratza professional grinder, for example, for a business, we also have other options in its catalogue of even greater range. You can see them all in the following gallery:

The two that we mentioned at the beginning, by power and by price, could be seen as semi-professional coffee grinders, oriented to domestic use but with great demands.

Mahlkönig coffee grinders

The Germans at Mahlkönig know a lot about grinders, as demonstrated, for example, by the spectacular Mahlkönig Vario (a digital coffee grinder with a dispenser, almost 100% automatic).

The rest of their range is coffee grinders for coffee shops. We do not recommend buying a Mahlkönig grinder from this range; if it is not to be used in a business, it will not make sense.

Eureka coffee grinders

If you are buying a Eureka coffee grinder, you really only have two options: the Eureka MCI Mignon and the Eureka Atom. The second is a 100% professional grinder designed only for business and for very specific purposes (its price is close to 1000 pounds, no less). And of the first one, you can read the review we have made on the web.

The interesting thing is that each of them can be found in different finishes or colours, as you can see here:

The best professional coffee grinders

And after reviewing the most important brands, it is time to briefly review some models of the best professional coffee grinders. Our initial selection is made up of these three examples:

Lelit PL71 grinder

We start with the Lelit PL71 coffee grinder. If you are already an expert in the espresso sector, you will already know that the Italians at Lelit only manufacture and market products of the highest quality in search of excellence. And this grinder is a reflection of that philosophy, which they also extend to their amazing range of manual espresso machines.

The Lelit PL71 is a professional grinder made of stainless steel, with 100 watts of power and 50 mm diameter grinding wheels. The grinders are continuously adjustable, not discretionary (i.e. no predefined steps or degrees), and have a storage capacity of 350 grams of coffee beans.

Rancilio Rocky grinder

The next on our list is a timeless classic: the Rancilio Rocky professional grinder. It is probably the best coffee grinder on the market in terms of value for money, and despite its price, it is the favourite of many of the most enthusiastic consumers with a taste for espresso.

Some quick facts about it: 50 mm flat grinders (same as the previous one), 300-gram container with tinted housing to protect the coffee beans, metal finish, version with or without dispenser… and discretionary grinding adjustment up to 55 different levels or thicknesses.

Macap M42 grinder

The third protagonist on our podium is a model that is little known in some countries but is the absolute leader in Central Europe: the professional Macap M42 grinder. It is marketed with different colour finishes, and its stainless steel grinding wheels have a diameter of 58 mm (significantly larger than others we have analysed here).

The dimensions of this monster, more oriented to the hotel and catering industry than to domestic use, are 43 x 31 x 19 cms. However, if you want to buy a Macap coffee grinder from Amazon, go ahead and prepare your budget. Here below, you have the updated price list, as of today, for this finish:

How to calibrate a coffee grinder

When buying a professional coffee grinder online, the main question we have is related to maintenance. They are not as simple instruments as ordinary grinders, and we are especially concerned about the complexity of their regulation. They are more precise and allow the barista to do more things, but this also means that there is a greater chance of messing up if we don’t do it properly.

If you want to know how to regulate a professional coffee grinder, pay attention to this video:

Second-hand professional coffee grinders

Well, you may have already noticed, if you didn’t know in advance, that professional coffee grinders are prohibitively expensive for many ordinary users. Spending more money on the grinder than on the coffee maker is something that many consumers do not fully assimilate. And cheap professional grinders do not exist.

Luckily, this type of grinder, apart from working well, is also built to withstand a lot of jogging and to be very durable over time. This means that buying a second-hand professional grinder can be a good idea: the savings are significant over the original price, and they still have many years to go.