Grinder - Capresso Infinity: Good on a budget

I thought it would be a good time to talk about my experience with the Capresso Infinity burr grinder. It's the time of year that we are buying gifts for a lot of people and we want to make sure that you are able to get some items that they won't use or enjoy. I believe that the Capresso Infinity is one of those grinders that if you have a budding coffee enthusiast on your list they will really like and help them on their way to that $1,500.00 grinder.. well maybe not but it will certainly help them enjoy that coffee you just bought them.

This grinder is what I would consider one the entry level grinders into really enjoying home coffee. There are a lot of "burr" grinders out there that are cheaper, but for the most part they use a wheel to crush the coffee, not the word crush or use such a small burr that it will wobble creating a great deal of inconsistencies. The nice thing that you can see from the picture below taken by an Amazon user, is the nice metal burrs that do a really good job of grinding.

Without going into great detail, the reason you want an even grind is that you want the water to be in contact with all of the coffee for the same amount of time. I.E. if you have a big coffee piece water needs to be contact with it longer than a small piece so you want them to be all the same size so you get the right flavors out.

Now the Capresso Infinity that you see here is the one I had the black plastic model there is also a brushed metal model and a heavier stainless steel model. Now the black plastic model and brushed model are good and cost in the range of ninty dollars, the stainless steel model costs about one thiry due to the added weight which will cut down on noice and slightly improve grind because there will be less wobble in the grinding burrs.

This grinder is excellent for brewing drip and press, my first experience with it out of the box and grinding was being amazed that my coffee ground looked like they came out of a preground can or from the store machine. I was able to see how much more even my grind was compared to the blade grinder I had been using.

The next thing you will notice is how much better you coffee is. The first pot of drip I made with this tasted sweet, a sweet I never tasted before. For someone that has never had a burr grinder before this one it was an eye opening experience that I wish I had experienced long ago.

There are a few bad things about this grinder, it won't grind fine enough or have the control for espresso. There are about 20 different settings to grind here and while the box says it can grind fine enough for turkish it doesn't do well for espresso because there is just too much variation in the grind because the burr wobble so much.

The other bad part is you need to pick the grinder up and hit it on the back to get all the ground out of the chamber and into your bin. Not really a big deal once you figure it out, but before you do you get a lot of stale coffee left in the grinder as the picture shows. It's does knock out with a brisk hit.

Clearly the step up outweighs the bad, you can find this grinder a lot of places including Amazon

You can however find a very similar grinder here on Roaste that I would like to recommended as well the Baratza Meastro Plus and from reviews might be slightly better.