(mystical music)
(beans rattle)
(frantic music)
Today, we're talking about the Fellow Ode 2,
the sequel to the Fellow Ode 1 grinder
that came out in 2020,
a grinder I was very excited for them to release,
but a grinder that I had a few real issues with
in my review.
In this sequel, have they fixed those issues?
Is this now a grinder
that's gonna be easy for me to recommend
at the end of this video?
If you're not familiar with the Ode,
it's a grinder from a company called Fellow.
It's a filter-coffee-only, single-dose grinder.
It's got 31 steps of adjustment
going all the way from very coarse
down to, well, not quite fine enough for espresso,
but really, pretty fine.
Now, in my first review,
there were two big areas
that I had concerns or problems with,
one around grinding
and one around, let's just say user experience.
We're gonna address those two areas
and talk about them a bit more
in how they relate to this new version of the grinder.
Let's start with how it grinds coffee.
Now, the Fellow Ode 1,
they chose a set of what they called interlocking burrs.
They were an interesting design of burr set,
but they did not allow you to grind fine enough
for the kind of brewing that I like to do,
which is, say, 15 grams of coffee from a light roast
in, say, a V60.
That needs a pretty fine grind,
and the Ode 1 simply couldn't do it.
The burrs couldn't get close enough because of their design,
and as a result, for me,
that was a kind of deal-breaker for the grinder.
Now, alongside this grinder, which has changed too,
they've been working on the Gen 2 burrs.
I have a set of them here.
These were supplied to me to go into my Ode 1
because I was a Kickstarter backer.
That grinder currently has a set of SSP burrs in it.
We'll talk about this stuff too. Don't you worry.
These burrs, I think,
are, frankly, very good.
They're being sold separately for $80,
and I think, as an $80 burr set,
they offer great value for money.
I used this grinder to do a lot of testing
for the one-cup V60 video that I put out not too long ago,
so I feel like I've got a really good idea
of how this kind of brews coffee
and the coffee that it produces,
and I also talked to Lance Hedrick,
who, alongside Nick from Fellow, did a lot of testing
along with, I think, some other industry experts too,
but Lance did a lot of testing,
and I spoke to both Lance and Nick
about what they were trying to achieve.
They were aiming for a burr set
that would give you great kind of texture and body
with more developed roasts,
but clarity and sweetness with lighter roasts,
and I have to say
I think Nick's burr design on this was excellent.
I really enjoyed drinking the coffee
that this burr set produced.
I think it's very good coffee.
Can you produce better coffee by spending more money?
You can, but those returns are rapidly diminishing.
I think if you were to drink the coffee from these burrs
on its own,
you'd really have a very good time.
Yes, when you put them in comparison
with a more expensive set or a more expensive grinder,
you can taste the differences,
but when I say those returns are diminishing,
I really, really mean it.
Quite early on, I thought it would be interesting
to compare this to the SSP burrs,
and in the cup, at matching extractions,
they were surprisingly close.
There was maybe a little bit more clarity in the SSP burrs,
fractionally more sweetness maybe,
but, you know, I was really searching for those differences,
and it felt so close, actually,
that I took samples of both grinders
and had them run through a particle size analyzer.
Now, before I show you the results
of laser particle size analysis
here's an important caveat:
Anytime anyone shows you some data from one of these,
you've gotta understand
that this is not how these burrs perform generally.
This is how these burrs performed on that day
with that particular roast of that particular coffee
at that particular grind setting.
They're a really specific instance,
but, I think, if you take the same extraction,
and therefore, the same theoretical grind setting
from two different burrs and compare them,
that is interesting,
and as you'll see as we show you the data,
they were really pretty similar.
Yes, the SSP produced less fines
not a huge amount less fines,
but you can see there is a difference there
in the finer particles.
Slightly more uniformity generally, but really pretty close.
Those SSP burrs sell for $185 on Fellow's website,
and I'm not sure that for most people in the world,
those $105 are well spent.
These $80 burrs perform, I think, really very well.
It's clear that Nick and the team at Fellow
put in a lot of time to get this whole thing right,
and I think it was time well spent.
Now, we need to talk about the UX kind of piece of it
because frankly, the Ode 1 was messy
and a little bit annoying.
To highlight the changes they've made,
I'm gonna brew some coffee,
so the first change they've made is the hopper on top.
It's a little bit taller,
and that means you can get,
say, 80 grams of coffee in here relatively easily.
More important than the kind of capacity, for most people,
is the fact that the angle of the hopper has changed.
The Ode 1, I think, had about a 20-degree angle.
This has gone up to a 27-degree angle,
so you're less likely with the Ode 2,
when you pour your beans in,
to have a few beans left behind in the hopper
that didn't fall all the way through into the burr set,
something that is, frankly, very annoying.
The second change is harder to show you here.
We'll go into it in a little bit more detail in a second,
but there is an ionizer at the exit chute of this grinder.
They've redesigned the exit chute and massively improved it.
The old grinder both had a lot of static issues
as well as a lot of retention when you were grinding.
This grinder still has some retention and some exchange
wherein you might put 15 grams in and get 15 grams out,
but not all of the 15 grams coming out
is the same coffee that you put in.
Some may be retained from the time before and pushed out,
and new coffee then gets stuck and left inside.
This makes way less mess, way less static.
It is a massive quality of life improvement for me
because the static on the first one
really, really kind of wound me up.
(coffee grinder rasping)
Did you hear that? Or did you not hear that?
The first Ode had this really irritating beep
when it finished grinding
that I frankly did not understand.
(coffee grinder beeps)
Firstly, it wasn't a good beep, and you need a good beep,
and secondly, there's already an auditory cue
that the grinder has finished grinding,
as in, I can't hear it grinding anymore.
You don't need to give me a secondary signal
to say, "I've stopped grinding."
If you were trying to add a secondary signal,
it would make sense to do something
for people who maybe couldn't hear it grinding
and give them a little light
so they know that it's finished grinding.
This doesn't beep, and that's great.
That makes me happy.
You didn't need to beep. It doesn't beep.
(grinder knocker a-knocking)
That's about the most annoying noise on this grinder,
It's not a bad bag knocker.
The dosing cup here
that you can use to weigh your coffee beans in
if you want to,
and obviously, you would grind into,
has been changed as well.
It's a little bit larger to accommodate more coffee
because the hopper can accommodate more coffee,
but it's still got the little fins inside,
and I've gotta tell you, I don't love the little fins.
I feel like if they'd changed the angle of the fins here,
made them a little steeper, a little sharper,
they'd be less likely to sort of trap coffee behind them
when you dose it out
and do the job of funneling the coffee quite nicely,
but this setup here, often, you need to kind of go back,
shake a little bit, and pour a second time,
and that just doesn't really delight me.
Now, they did keep the magnet on the bottom of this
and the magnet here
so that you do have the fun little snap.
I do have one more nitpick.
I know I have reviewer brain,
and I'm kind of broken in that way,
but the way that this lid fits on this dosing cup
really kind of bothers me.
It just, it sits that fraction bit loose, always,
and that, I don't like it.
I don't like it.
It makes you feel like I haven't seated it right,
and I end up sort of faffing around and trying to reseat it.
I think you can probably get away with just not using this,
and that would be the answer.
I'll be honest,
if someone made a third-party dosing cup for this,
I'd be interested if it was without fins
and didn't do some of the annoying stuff that this does,
and it just irks me, and I don't wanna be irked.
It's done so much
in terms of its evolution from the 1 to the 2
to remove points of frustration,
but it's got this weird one that kind of wound me up.
Let me brew this coffee.
Nailing this recipe...
Now, while this cools down so I can drink it,
and I really do want to drink it,
I wanna go back
and talk a little bit more about the ionizer on this thing,
which is, I think, a significant improvement.
To give you an idea of how effective it is,
what I'll do is I'll show you the Ode 1 and the Ode 2,
both with no sort of spray of water onto the beans.
It's called the Ross Droplet Technique (RDT),
if you're not familiar with it,
and it removes static in most grinders,
so I'll give you with and without the spray
on both grinders, side by side,
shot in absurdly high frame rate
so you can really kind of see the difference
between all of them.
I always spray as a kind of force of habit,
and so I still spray with this,
and I generally prefer to still spray with this grinder,
but if I forget, I don't feel punished
the same way that I did
with the first generation of Ode grinder.
Here they are in glorious slow motion.
(celestial music)
Now, I will say, if you're looking at my dial
and thinking that's a bit finer than you might be using it,
we are getting pretty high extractions
with light roasted coffees around here,
so 22 to 23% very comfortably with a V60 like this,
and the cups have been just great.
Tons of sweetness, plenty of clarity, nice body,
and I don't wanna nitpick it against other burrs
because most people never will.
Does it make coffee you will enjoy most mornings?
Yes, yes it does,
and in terms of summary, does it still look good?
It really does.
I like the design of the Ode very much.
I love its very small footprint.
I think it's simple in all the right ways,
and, in fact, one small improvement they've made,
I feel like particularly useful to me,
is that on the inside of this,
they changed, very slightly, this chart
to explain the numbers on here.
I just couldn't read the first one.
I just felt like I was just not bright enough
to kind of cope with the information I was presented.
This I find much more readable and understandable,
and so I'm grateful to Fellow for that one
'cause I messed it up the first time.
Always embarrassing when it's on YouTube forever,
so it feels like this is an easy recommendation from me,
and it nearly is.
You know, the little gripes that I have with it,
the little complaints are really relatively small.
The last thing that we haven't talked about is price.
Now, this isn't out in the UK yet.
In fact, this is a 110 U.S. model.
The 240 volt or the 230 volt,
or whatever the proper voltage is gonna be,
that's coming a little bit later,
and so we don't have the pricing for that yet,
but in the U.S., this is $345,
which, I don't know how I feel about that.
The first grinder, I think, was 299 or 295.
It was a $300 grinder,
but the left digit, perhaps the most important digit,
was a 2, and they've made it a 3 here.
Now, I'm not sure
it feels like it should be a more expensive grinder
because, yes, they've spent money on a new burr set
and all that kind of stuff,
but at the same time, they've built a lot of these.
Component costs should be coming down.
They talk about how the new Opus grinder,
their new espresso and filter conical burr grinder,
has a more powerful motor in there,
so the cost of this, I'm not really sure where it is.
Now, this is just pure speculation on my part,
but I feel like the price is the price
in part because they still have stock of the Ode 1
that they need to sell,
and I think if that grinder was put up against this grinder,
and this one was under $300,
people would just choose this every single time,
and people wouldn't buy the cheaper Ode
at the price that they're trying to sell it at,
so by having it that little bit higher,
I think it creates a nice differential in price
that encourages sales of the Ode sort of number 1,
but for people who really care
about all the things that the Ode 2 does,
(sighs) yes, I think it's good value for money.
I think there are grinders coming
that will challenge its space
in terms of being small footprint,
really good for filter coffee, not capable of espresso,
but well-made, well-built,
enjoyable to use, great cup quality.
Right now, a lot of people are like,
"What grinder should I get for filter?
"I don't wanna do espresso at home."
This feels much easier to recommend
as long as they have the budget,
and 345 does feel like quite a lot of money.
If this was at 295,
I just feel like be so easy to recommend it,
so that's my opinion of the Ode 2 with the Gen 2 burrs.
I have to say I'm pleased
with the changes that have been made.
I think it is a good grinder.
I enjoy the coffee that comes out of it very much.
Mm. Ah.
Oh, that's very nice. That is nice.
Derailing myself immediately.
I'm trying to wrap up here.
Now, this particular grinder
is gonna go to one of my Patreon supporters.
They support me
in being able to buy this equipment at full price,
like a normal consumer,
and then test it and give you my honest opinion
and not be reliant on reviewing it or freebies
or any of that stuff,
so thank you so much to them for the support in doing this,
but now I wanna hear from you down in the comments below.
These are shipping. People have these.
How has your experience been with it?
Has it been different to mine?
I have heard people having different experiences,
issues with things like jamming or stalling
or that kind of stuff.
I've had no issues of any kind with this grinder
at lighter or more developed roasts,
so if you're having a different experience,
if you wanna share how you're getting on,
leave me a comment down below.
We would love to hear from you,
but for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching,
and I hope you have a great day.