- Today we're gonna review this,
the Niche Zero Grinder.
It's a grinder that has confounded
my expectations in a good way.
So let me tell you about where this came from.
This I first saw on Indiegogo,
and for that reason, ignored, because it was from
an unknown manufacturer, it was crowdfunding,
and it made some big promises
about fixing problems with coffee.
And those three things together are a giant red flag.
And I will broadly ignore anything
that has those three things, on crowdfunding
or anywhere else., because most
of the time it's just not gonna happen.
There's been a lot of companies turned up,
new to manufacturing, gonna do something
big and bold and I'm gonna kick start it,
or put it in Indiegogo, and you get nothing.
You get burned usually.
So, I ignored it, to my detriment to be honest,
because for every rule that I have there's probably
and exception, and this might just be one.
So I wasn't gonna look at it,
I wasn't gonna review it, but then
they got in touch and said did I want to,
you know, to try, and I said no, I have a Patreon.
Which is amazing, so thank you to Patreon supporters.
Which means that I can buy the equipment
that I review so it's an independent review.
And I explained this to them and we agreed
that I would buy a unit, and they gave me
a small discount for which I am very grateful,
but I still bought this and this will be
given away, sort of, to a Patreon backer.
So this thing's £500 in the UK,
and ships, I think, all over the world,
they do a one ten and a two twenty volt model.
And, for the money I have to say compared
to other grinders at the same price point,
it's pretty small, it's pretty light,
it's about five kilos, but it feels very well built,
it feels very nicely put together,
it feels really solid, it sounds solid
when it grinds, it just feels good.
Now, design wise, I can't tell you
how to feel about how something looks,
it looks like a kitchen appliance,
it has a little bit of coffee grinder in there
and a little bit of juicer in there too.
It comes, I think in jus two colors, a white and a black.
But I like how it looks.
The detail around the wood is nice,
it's built by someone who's built things before,
and this I think is really key,
it might be a new company, but Martin
the guy behind it, has spent a long time
designing and building products,
and I think that really really shows.
So, it's called the Niche Zero
because it's big promise is zero retention
which we'll get into also in a little bit.
Now, the design I think is interesting
because design is about picking problems
and finding solutions for those problems.
There's whole suite of problems you can
look at with a coffee grinder and I think
the selection that they've chosen to fix
or attempted to fix here, is a very smart selection.
For example, this is not a grinder
trying to fix dosing for you.
You are gonna weigh your coffee beans,
put them in, grind them, right.
The grinder is gonna do no work to help
you dose your coffee, whatsoever.
That's not a problem it's interested in solving.
Here, wat they're really trying to do,
is get out everything that you put in.
The whole point of zero retention
is that there's nothing left inside.
Which is mostly true.
It's not entirely true, there's always
gonna be a little bit of retention
and even if you put eighteen and a half in
and get eighteen and a half out,
that doesn't mean zero retention,
there probably was some coffee retained
and exchanged and replaced,
the old replaced by the new.
And it retains a consistent amount.
But that amount isn't very much.
So it is definitely an espresso focused grinder.
And so the work flow with this
is very very simple, you've got an on/off
switch on the side, you've got a lid.
Under the lid you have you're bean funnel
where you're gonna load your coffee
in once you've weighed it.
Conical Burr set in here.
It's from Mazzer Koney Burrs in here.
The funnel is also your grind adjuster, which is nice.
It's a step less adjustment with a little
indicator on here as well to see
where you've been, where you're going.
And, coffee in, close the lid,
there's a little micro switch here, and turn it on.
It really is very very simple.
And I think that's a really good thing.
Not only for longevity, but in terms
of componentry that's gone into this.
This is well built, there's a good motor in here.
There's a good set of Burrs in here,
if you like Conical Burrs.
And that's very nearly it.
With the exception of one thing,
which is this little thing here,
which is your dosing cup,
which I think is beautifully made
because this is juts under 58 mls
which means if you want a dose
from here into your Portafilter
just put your Portafilter on top,
upside down and the flip everything over.
Zero mess, zero fuss.
It's a beautiful little thing that kind of should
be available with all coffee grinders.
The idea of sort of tipping ground coffee
into a Portafilter, the spill, the mess,
the new and additional funnel,
all of that noise I'm not interested in it.
I like this kind of zen approach of what's
the least I have to do to get great results?
That's really a thing I like a lot.
So let's talk about performance.
How is it to use to make coffee with?
Well, as I said it is a Conical Burr set
in there, it's the same Burr set
as you might find in a Mazzer Koney.
And I am not a huge fan of Conical Burr sets
compared to flat Burr sets, my preference
has always been for flat Burr sets.
I pulled a bunch of shots with this
and I had some very very tasty espresso with it.
I did pull shots with this against
a Mythos one as a kind of benchmarking tool.
And I really liked the shots that I got off this.
I slightly preferred the shots of the Mythos
for having a little bit more clarity to them,
which isn't hugely surprising, it's a good
flat Burr grinder, I really like the shots
from it and the espresso blend I was using
was benchmarked against it so,
the odds were stacked in the Mythos one's favor.
But, I really did enjoy the coffee I got from this thing.
Some really nice shots, didn't speed
up too much in the second half, didn't show
too much in the way of signs of channeling.
I was pretty happy with the shots
that I got from this thing.
I think there's a couple of really
neat, clever little things here.
Adjusting the grinder's very easy, very intuitive.
The spacing between sort of dots
and sort of guidance is good.
You need to make a decent enough
movement to have a substantial change in grinds.
You feel like you can tweak quite easily,
which is kind of nice on this.
There is a calibration function
for the little dot under here,
if you take it all the way fine.
You can then adjust this bottom ring
so that it lines up with calibrate
and you should be pretty calibrated,
grinder to grinder to grinder.
Now, this wasn't perfect for me
but it was a pretty good starting place
and a pretty good idea I think.
Certainly you have way more calibration
than you would do with most typical grinders
that just have a selection of random numbers
from zero to nine that you're somewhere on at some point.
So, overall pretty happy, and I spent
most of the time pulling shots
in the middle of the espresso region.
In terms of things that I didn't like
as much, I wish this held a little bit more coffee.
Because sometimes I wanted to make
a large batch of coffee with this.
I'll often make a liter of coffee
and I wanted to use it for filter coffee
and it performs pretty well for filter coffee.
Again my preference might be for flat Burr grinders
but I really enjoyed the coffee I got from this.
But you can just sort of get about
fifty, fifty five grams in here.
I kind of wish it was just a nice even sixty.
That's just me.
Now if you do want to grind for sort of
a medium sized batch filter from a half liter
up to a liter, you're gonna be too coarse for the dial.
Which is a bit of a shame.
I know some people have started putting dots
on the other side of their dials
to sort of track where they're going
with the coarser grind settings and I think
that might be an interesting improvement for the future.
And I suppose one of the bigger complaints
that I have with this is that it does
suffer pop-corning a little bit
towards the end of grinding a shot.
So those last few beans as they're grinding
tend to bounce around quite a lot
and take a little while to sort of suck them through.
You're looking at, at least a twenty second
grind time for eighteen to twenty grams of coffee,
so it's relatively slow but not
so slow that that's a problem for me
if I was pulling shots at home or anywhere else.
But it does popcorn a little bit.
And that means those beans do grind
in a way, a little bit coarser
than the other beans which isn't ideal.
It's not a big problem, like I said
it doesn't really damage the shots generally
but if you compared let's say,
eighteen grams of coffee that had not
pop-corned at all by let's say grinding
twenty five grams and stopping early
to eighteen grams that did have some pop-corning
in it, then I would see maybe a four,
maybe five second variants in shot time as a result.
So having maybe a better orga system,
maybe feed beans in, I don't really know
what the answer is but I do know
that pop-corning does change your grind
a lite bit, so the more pop-corning there is
the more variants you'll have as a result.
That maybe why some of the shots don't have
the same kind of clarity as a Mythos
with a hopper full of coffee.
You know, grinding through like this
in any grinder that you'll grind through
will produce a small variants in grind setting
as a result of those last beans having no force
behind them kind of driving them into the Burrs.
No weight of coffee behind them.
That's true on an EK, that's true
if you single dosed a Mythos,
that's true if you dosed just sort of anything really,
like a Baraza Granda or something like that.
Those last few beans on any grinder will popcorn.
In some cases they popcorn more than others, that's all.
So that's something I'd like to see
addressed in the future, and also
I'd be interested to see if they ever
do build a flat Burr version of this grinder,
that would get me very excited indeed, but-
I should give you a summary right?
Like I should give you a summary of how I feel.
And to be honest, charmed, I feel charmed
by this grinder, I just really like it.
I like the way it's built, I like
the design thinking behind it.
I think it's really enjoyable to use.
If you said how does it stack up against a Mahlkonig EK43?
Well I would say that's a very dangerous
question to ask, because the EK is a nice
set of Burrs, accidentally designed
by Mahlkonig at some point, attached to
not a particularly compelling grinder.
The EK is not beautiful, it's heavy,
it's expensive, it's not particularly
pleasurable to use, it has a nice set of Burrs.
This is a pleasure to use, this sort of
highlights a lot of the flaws of a grinder
like the EK because of it's ease and pleasure of use.
And I'll give you an example of just
what feels nice and simple.
I got a bag of coffee from a friend
and just a small bag, and I wanted
to dial it in, and so here I would dose
eighteen and a half grams, grind
eighteen and a half grams, pull a shot
and make an adjustment as necessary.
And yeah the retention isn't completely zero,
there's a little bit of exchange happening there,
but it's so little that you don't need
to purge between grinder adjustments, right.
I would adjust the grind and just grind
a fresh dose straight afterwards.
And I had no issues with that.
It meant that very quickly, very easily
I could dial in to exactly where I needed to be,
with almost no excessive waste, right.
I got a lot of shots out of a bag of coffee
and I don't think I'm alone
in people using this grinder.
So, from a waste perspective, it's pretty great.
The retention is certainly low enough for me
to be very very happy with it, I don't think
there's any issues with it's retention.
It's just a pleasure to use.
And so, yeah, the way that this works is that
Patreon that fund each month let's me go and buy
equipment to review independently.
But I wanna keep this, I'm not gonna
give it away so I'm gonna buy a brand new one
to give away to Patreon backers
and this one I'm gonna keep, I kinda
just want it around, there's a lot
of uses for a grinder like this for me.
And it's rare that I wanna add to my collection of stuff.
It's rare that I want one more piece of kit in my life.
I have enough stuff.
The whole point of Patreon is to give it away.
I don't want to accumulate endless stuff.
The good news is, they build these in
one ten and one two twenty volt
which means that I can sort of open
it up to Patreon backers all over the world
it doesn't matter, I'll ship it to
wherever it needs to go, and I kind of
like that I get to give away a brand new one
and it can be white or black and they can choose.
I'm gonna keep this one though.
Overall I'm impressed, as a sort of first time
product, a first time manufacturer,
I think they've knocked it out of the park.
That's not to say it's flawless,
but it's great, it's very good and I've just
been enthusiastic about it to other people
which has got to be a pretty good sign.
So there you go, that is my review of the Niche Zero.
Do you have a Niche?
Do you have one of these?
How is your experience so far?
Are you seeing less coffee wastage?
Are you happy with the shots that you're getting?
Does the pop-corning drive you crazy
or does it not bother you at all?
Are you brewing filter coffee?
What kind of results are you having?
I'd be really interested to hear
your thoughts in the comments down below.
Please share them with all of us.
That's it for today so I'll say thank you
so much for watching and I hope you have a great day.