Today, we're gonna be doing a grinder comparison.
As a comparison, it's a grouping, it's kind of weird,
but I promise you, there's method to my madness.
Now, two of these grinders we have seen before.
The Wilfa Uniform's appeared in a couple of videos already.
This is the grinder that I have at home.
If you haven't seen anything about it,
click up here or down in the description below.
And then we have the Fellow Ode
that was in a video recently.
If you wanna have a little look at that,
that's up here or down the description.
And then there's this thing.
This is the Xeoleo, I'm not sure of the pronunciation.
It's a grinder I bought on AliExpress for about $160.
And it's a fun little grinder that sort of,
sort of makes sense in this comparison because the Wilfa,
this one is about 325 pounds
or 275 without the scale in the top.
The Ode seems to be around 295 pounds.
So this is half the price of the other two.
Why is it here?
Well, it's here because of its burr set.
This has a standard flat burr set.
This one has a kind of hybrid interlocking burr set.
And the most extreme version of that
is actually inside this,
which is called ghost teeth burrs, or interlocking burrs,
and they look like nothing else, really.
They're a really unique design
that you really don't see very much.
But I wanted to pick up a grinder like this that had them
and see how it fared.
Here's how the testing is gonna run.
I'll just quickly show you a few little things
about this Xeoleo,
just so you're kind of up to speed with it,
if you're familiar with these other two grinders.
And then we're gonna run a few simple tests.
We're ultimately gonna brew three V60s
side-by-side that we'll taste, but before that,
we'll start with a pretty simple speed test.
We'll grind 30 grams of coffee
in each one of these grinders and see how long it takes.
Then we'll have a little look at the grinds distribution,
nothing too complicated, but I hope interesting nonetheless.
And then, ultimately, we will brew those three,
and taste them side-by-side.
Now, when it comes to setting the grind for the V60,
this was an interesting challenge.
Both of the two grinders that have interlocking burrs
have limits on how fine they can go before the burrs touch.
And that limit is much coarser
than a standard flat burr grinder.
So this grinder can go all the way down past espresso fine
into kind of Turkish coffee fine, almost like a flour.
These two both have a very similar limit
that's just about fine enough for me to brew a V60 with.
Without that limit,
we could have brewed a different brew method
or a different amount of coffee,
but this seems the fairest way.
I was able to dial them all in
to a very similar extraction level which should make,
I hope, for an interesting tasting.
This won't be, however,
an exhaustive tasting because there's
only so much coffee tasting that can be done,
but it should be interesting nonetheless.
The one other thing to note is that this grinder
has been in use for a couple of years now.
It grinds 30 to 60 grams of coffee most days
for the last two years.
These have all had a good amount of coffee put through them.
They've also both been recalibrated to be able to go
as fine as is possible without the burrs touching,
but this is just a much more seasoned and used grinder.
Let's start, though,
with a quick overview of this little grinder.
For $160, it's kind of fun.
Its burr set is here at the front
and it is vertically mounted,
which I think is generally a good thing
with the motor sitting behind it.
Your hopper on top feels pretty plastic.
Doesn't feel very expensive or particularly lovely,
but it's $160, but it does sit on top of a little gate.
This would allow you to turn on your motor
without coffee falling into the burrs,
but having loaded your beans into the hopper,
once your motors up and running,
you can just open the little gate
and your beans will drop into a running motor,
which is generally considered better for the grinder.
So that's a nice little touch.
On the back of the grinder,
the power switch has two power settings.
It has a continuous mode.
And it has a push-to-go mode,
because on the front here, there's a little button,
and as you push it in,
the grinder runs.
Now, it comes with this dosing cup
that seems a little bit odd at first glance
because it's got three pieces.
Piece number one is your grinds catch bin,
pretty standard, nice enough.
There's a little insert for it though,
which looks like a tea strainer, but instead,
has a bunch of holes in it
for potentially sieving out the fines,
which is an unusual addition to a grinder, I will add.
The holes appear to be about 500 microns in size,
which is quite large,
but probably pretty effective at getting
anything remotely fine out of there.
And then if you are shaking, there is a little lid.
So you can grind in, put the lid on top,
and shake the life out of it to get rid
of any fines that you potentially don't want
in your grind distribution.
I will just say now,
having criticized certainly the Ode for this,
and a little bit, the Wilfa,
this is a messy grinder.
Coffee goes everywhere.
Whether you do a little spritzing first,
a little droplet of water in the beans or not,
it makes a terrible mess.
And it does annoy me quite a bit, but for $160,
can it grind coffee in an interesting and delicious way?
That's really the question.
And to talk about those burr sets,
I suppose we should open it up.
To open it up is actually pretty easy.
There's two screws on the front here
and we'll take 'em off kind of the same time.
Now, the teeth on this are really unlike anything
I really ever see in any other coffee grinder.
I've never seen burrs like this
in a commercial grinder that I've used.
I'm not saying they don't exist,
just that I'm unfamiliar with them.
But you've got these two sets of teeth that interlock
with each other that are gonna cut the coffee
in a totally different way.
That's really interesting.
That was my motivation, actually,
to buy this grinder, it wasn't the price.
I just wanted a ghost teeth burr grinder to check out,
to see what I thought of it.
Does it reduce fines?
Does it grind more uniformly?
Does coffee taste better?
These are the questions we wanna answer.
So I'll put it back together, weigh out some coffee,
and we'll run our first test, which is grind speed.
Ready, steady, go.
Pretty quick, let's try the Ode.
Very quick.
And now let's try the Wilfa.
A bit slower, a lot slower.
Now, for some people, this is an absolute deal breaker.
They can't stand how slow this is.
I've talked about in the past
that it doesn't bother me that much
because I'm usually doing other things
while coffee is grinding.
I can be sorting out water,
rinsing papers on a brewer.
There's other stuff to be doing.
But in comparison to these two,
it is so, so slow.
So for today's video,
I'm gonna be using a couple of tools from Kruve.
This is the sifter that you've seen before.
I'm gonna be sifting this with two screens inside it.
This will allow me to separate the coffee pieces by size.
The first piece is 1,000 microns, a millimeter in size.
Anything bigger than this for me
is a little bit bigger than I might want.
It's heading towards being a bit bolder-y.
Then you've got a screen at 400 microns.
Anything below this will be a fine-ish piece of coffee,
not necessarily a quote/unquote, "fine,"
but certainly a finer piece.
These are very broad, broad,
sort of cross-sections of coffee distribution.
But I'm actually less worried these days about fines,
and I'm much more worried about larger pieces in my coffee.
It's a big chunk of coffee
that I just won't get anything out of.
It's inevitably going to under-extract
in comparison to the rest of the coffee there.
So bigger pieces are, for me,
as big a concern as very fine pieces.
And, you know, while there are things
out there to sieve out fine pieces,
rarely do people sieve out large pieces
or worry about them very much,
which I think is perhaps a mistake.
Now, I also recently bought this.
This is the Brewler from Kruve,
which I think is a reasonably hilarious pun.
It's kind of useful in today's video.
One, I told you that the size of the holes
in that sieving piece for the Xeoleo were 500 microns.
This just let me check that.
So you've got holes of each micron size along here.
Now, this is intended, I think,
to be put next to coffee to give you an idea
of how large your pieces of coffee are.
They also give you a little grind distribution chart
to show you roughly where each brew method kind of lies.
Let's start sifting.
I'll give each grinder a couple of minutes of shaking,
and then, we'll have a look at how those 30 grams
of coffee have separated out.
So far, so interesting.
And I'll throw that data up now
as a percentage of the total grounds,
that way it's kind of normalized
for any retention stuck in the grinder.
And you can have a look at that chart.
Now, this is really important.
Before you make any real meaningful decisions
or inferences from this data,
know that it's mostly worthless.
This is not a full grind distribution.
This just gives you a rough idea
of how many pieces are above a certain size,
how many pieces are below a certain size, that's it.
There's no more granular information about the distribution.
What's notable to me is that these are all grinders
achieving a similar level of extraction
for a similar brew method
with quite different grind distributions.
When you brew coffee,
it's really only the surface of the grounds
that can be extracted.
In a large piece of coffee,
water won't really meaningfully penetrate inside it
to get the good stuff out.
It'll really be what's on the surface.
What you can't tell, even from a ground distribution chart,
is total surface area because it's
kind of a 2D snapshot of a 3D thing.
Looking at this, I don't know how they're gonna achieve
a similar level of surface area,
and I don't know how that's going to taste yet.
That's what we're gonna find out.
But what we can say is that Uniform
is better from that testing,
even though it may have less larger pieces,
comparatively few very fine pieces,
we don't know whether the stuff between 400 and 1,000
is a wide spread or unimodal.
We just don't know that stuff.
But when we taste, that's the important thing,
and we should probably taste.
But before we do that, I should note that there is
one grinder probably missing from this range.
And that's one from Baratza, something like the Sette.
I'm not including Baratza in testing at the moment
because I'm doing a coffee giveaway
with any sponsored video.
I'm giving away five Baratza Encores
to anyone who really needs them,
anywhere in the 39 countries that we can
ship to and warranty to.
If you can afford a grinder,
please don't enter and buy one from a local business.
But if life is tough right now,
and you could really do with a grinder,
click down below, it's free to enter.
From my point of view,
it just felt a little bit wrong to be working
with one company while comparing it to another.
Even though I'm paying for these grinders,
I don't want the perception of bias
in these kind of reviews.
And this is all possible, these giveaways,
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So we're gonna brew three V60s back-to-back.
What I'm gonna do is pour a good size sample
of each brew into a cupping bowl.
It'll be marked on the bottom
for which grinder it came from.
Once they're all brewed, then I will leave,
someone else will switch them around
so I don't know what I'm tasting.
I'll let them all settle to kind of room temperature
when they'll be very easy to taste the differences.
And I come back and taste them and talk about them.
And then at the end of that,
I'll find out which is which, let's brew.
So the brew's been brewed.
I'm gonna leave the room.
These are gonna get switched around,
and I'll come back when they're cool enough
that they're all pretty similar temperatures,
and I'll start tasting them.
Now, as we get into the tasting,
this is a really important thing to think about first.
This is why people get kind of mad about refractometers
because if you measure the refractive index,
if you measure the strength of these three brews,
they're all pretty much the same,
but they're gonna taste different.
Which means that just hitting the right numbers
doesn't guarantee you a good brew.
It's how you get there, that's kind of everything.
Secondly, I am familiar with these grinders.
This isn't the first time I brewed with them.
I've brewed with the Xeoleo a little bit,
I've had it a few months now.
Obviously, I've brewed with the Wilfa
for a couple of years at least.
The Ode, only maybe a month or so.
But it's not my first time brewing these.
So I do have some expectations around how coffee has tasted
from these that might be reflected in this blind tasting.
We'll find out.
This brew is okay,
but it just has this present
kind of bitterness coming in at the back of it.
Like, it's a little hollow, but also a little bitter.
This particular kind of bitterness, I'm gonna take a guess,
reminds me of the bitterness
I often get from the Xeoleo grinder.
There's often something about it that just feels
a little bit harsh and almost burnt in the coffee.
And I don't really understand why it tastes like that,
but it often does to me.
Certainly with lighter roasts, it can shift that way.
I haven't brewed a lot of darker roasts with this,
which may be where it shines.
Anyway, moving on.
That brew is very clean.
It's very sweet.
It's very pleasant.
At this point, I don't know which grinder it is.
It's just a, it's just a really nice, sweet brew of coffee.
And honestly, so is this one.
These are both very nice.
What I would say with both of them,
if I didn't know the grinder,
I would wanna go just a fraction finer.
Which means if one of these is the Ode,
and I think one of them is the Ode,
it's frustrating to me that I can't go
that little bit finer still.
That is for me, with light to medium filter style roasts,
a little bit of a headache.
If I had to pick,
maybe this one is just a fractionally more complex brew?
This is also very nice too.
Like, these are both very tasty brews.
This one is a tier below in terms of flavor
even though it's of a very similar extraction.
It just doesn't feel as kind of coherent,
for want of a less pretentious term.
But it just doesn't feel as together.
It just feels a bit disjointed.
There's some astringency here.
There's some bitterness here.
I just don't like it as much.
This, in this particular one-off experiment,
I like the most, but this is also a very tasty brew too.
I would struggle potentially in a triangle test
to pick them apart.
Let's find out what's what.
This has an X at the bottom,
which means it is indeed the Xeoleo.
This has a little U at the bottom for Uniform.
And this one, therefore, is of course,
I don't know why I'm looking, it's obviously the Ode.
Let's wrap this all up with a little summary.
Let's start with the Xeoleo.
This is cheap and it's surprisingly full-featured
for its cheapness.
It's easy to access the burrs.
It's east to take it apart.
There's a few little details that are kind of nice.
It's messy, it's really messy.
And honestly, I don't love the coffee that it produces.
It's up against grinders twice its price.
So it would be kind of shocking if it made coffee
as good as those grinders,
and it doesn't make coffee as good.
If I was drinking darker roasts,
I wonder if the burrs inside this are better suited
to those kinds of roasts, or you know,
that in combination with the sifting option
that it has built into it, which I'm generally against,
because it's pretty wasteful.
So it's kind of fun.
It doesn't feel too cheap.
It doesn't feel super well-made either.
It's kind of worth the money?
I'm not sure I'd recommend though,
importing them if you have no support.
If it breaks, all that kind of stuff,
you're kind of on your own.
So buying stuff like this is very much at your own risk.
The Ode is a great little grinder that has
a couple of frustrations for me.
I wish it could go finer.
And if I had an Ode, I wouldn't be selling it right now,
I wouldn't be upgrading it to a Uniform, necessarily,
because I'd be waiting for them
to produce some other burr options.
There's both the SSP burrs that I'll test in the future
alongside the promised new burrs from Fellow themselves,
that are able to go that a little bit finer.
This makes it a kind of interesting platform
for different burrs in the future.
And for that, it is interesting.
Overall, it's a capable grinder.
It's a good-looking grinder.
And I think it has an exciting future.
Right now, though, if I was shopping,
I would just be thinking about,
is it worth paying the extra for the new burrs
or would I just wait until they offer new burrs
at the same price as this right now?
And that leaves the Uniform, which does a good job.
It makes nice coffee.
And it has a very wide range of grind sizes.
It's incredibly slow.
It comes with a scale if you want it to,
that's really not worth the money,
but the cheaper one, I think,
is worth the money at 275 pounds.
It's not perfect, I've talked about that in the reviews.
It has its limitations, but in this particular situation,
I think it did very well.
If you started from scratch and you don't own a grinder
or you're looking to upgrade to this level,
it should be a contender and is worth thinking about,
but I would be holding off to see
how the new burrs perform with this thing.
And that's definitely something
I will look at in the future.
This particular one is going to a Patreon backer
that's been picked already and is heading out
as soon as we finish this review.
I'll buy another unit in the future
to put different burr sets in that,
to give it a full test.
But let me know down in the comments below,
what did I miss today?
What did you want me to explore about these grinders
and tell you a little bit more about?
All of them, it's very easy to access the burrs on them.
All of them, it's easy to change the burrs.
Maintenance is pretty limited.
There's plenty of control and adjustment across all of them.
But what more do you wanna see?
I'd love to hear from you down in the comments below,
but for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching.
Hope you have a great day.