I only recommend equipment that I use and like myself, and I tell you the good and the bad about it, and why I recommend it, so you can make your own mind. When you buy equipment from one of the links in this page, I get a small commission that helps me maintain this site.
I discussed a bit about espresso grinder requirements in What is good espresso. As a short recap, a good home espresso grinder must make a mostly uniform particle size, provide very narrow steps for grind size adjustment, hold the grind setting during grinding and drink-to-drink, and retain very little coffee inside the grinder. This is not a an easy task and not achievable for less than a few hundred dollars.
However, to make espresso at home with good espresso blends, there is no need to overspend. You will probably make only 2 or 3 espressos a day, so it is okay if your grinder is not built like a tank. Use any extra money to get fresh coffee more often.
Baratza Sette
The Baratza Sette series represents the best compromise between price, functionality, and performance for entry-level home espresso at less than $400.
The Baratza Sette 30 AP is the home espresso grinder I use and recommend. You also need to get the adjustment ring from the Sette 270 and swap it yourself. This saves you $60 over buying the Sette 270. You can use that money to buy fresh coffee instead, as the difference in features between the 30 and the 270 does not affect the ability to make great espresso.
The Sette is an conical espresso grinder with steel burrs. It is different from most grinders in that the outer burr rotates (as opposed to the inner burr) and also because it has a straight unobstructed path from the burrs to the portafilter, so it retains very little coffee inside the grinder.
The good
Grind quality and consistency. The Sette makes a consistent and very fluffy grind that results in great espresso shots. If you have use lesser grinders (at even a similar price point), you know this is not a given. This grinder delivers on grind quality for espresso.
Grind distribution. With the Sette you can grind directly into your portafilter because it makes a neat cylindrical mound of grounds, so coffee distributes very evenly across the basket. With other grinders you might have to stir the coffee grounds in the portafilter to get an even distribution.
Continuous adjustment. The Sette has a macro adjustment ring that has steps and a micro adjustment ring that is continuous, so you can make very small adjustments to grind size to get the exact espresso flow that you are looking for. Many grinders in this price point have only steps, and on occasion one step can be too coarse and the next one too fine for the flow you want.
Grind setting independent of the amount of beans in the hopper. The Sette grinds at the same size (resulting on the same flow) regardless of the amount of the beans there are on the hopper, even if there are no beans (like if you just weight and grind beans for a single shot). This is not true for most conical grinders and makes your life that much easier when making espresso at home, where having a large amount of beans in the hopper at all times just leads to coffee getting stale.
Speed. The Sette grinds really fast. You can grind a 19 gram shot in about five seconds. Most grinders usually take at least 10 seconds to grind a 19 gram shot.
Looks. The Sette has a compact foot print and it looks sleek and modern compared to most kitchen appliances.
The bad
Noise. The Sette is very loud when grinding. You cannot have a conversation in the same room while it grinds and people in nearby rooms will certainly hear it. Luckily this is about 5 seconds or so and the grinding noise is not unpleasant, but it is something to keep in mind.
Plastic. The Sette has a lot of plastic components, inside and outside. More metal would be better looking and more durable, but for low volume home espresso and at the price point the plastic is not an issue for me.
Roast level sensitivity. The Sette works best for the typical good espresso roast, not too light, not too dark. Very dark roast spray grounds a bit outside the portafilter and make a little bit of a mess on your counter, while grinding very light roasts does not result in as good espresso as those coffees create with more expensive grinders. I do not like very light roasts nor very dark roasts for espresso at home, as discussed in other pages, so neither of these are a big issue in my opinion.
How to use the Sette
There are many approaches to using the Sette, since it has a decent size hopper, accurate time-based dosing (there is also a more expensive version that doses a specific weight in the portafilter), and little retention.
I recommend that you single dose on the Sette. This means that you keep the grinder hopper empty at all times, and when you want to make an espresso, you weight the exact amount of beans you need with a scale (say 19 grams), put that in the hopper, and grind all of it into your portafilter directly (more on the specifics of this later in this page). You will get very close weight of grinds (say 18.8 to 19.1 grams) as you put beans in thanks to the very low retention of this grinder.
If you follow this approach you do not rely on the timer dosing functionality, but this adds a step to the process of making an espresso (pre-weighting the beans). Why single dosing?
- Keep your coffee fresh. At home you may only make 2 or 3 espressos a day. Leaving beans in your hopper causes them to get stale, degrading the flavor day to day and causing you to have to adjust the grind setting a little bit every day because the flow changes as the beans get more stale. You can test and compare both approaches for yourself if you do not believe this. Hoppers are for cafes and other places that make tens or hundreds of espressos a day; in those cases a hopper makes sense. If you make three espressos a day, a hopper does not make sense to use.
- Know your dose. As I explain later, it is critical for consistent espresso making that you know how much ground coffee you are putting into the portafilter. When you pre-weight your beans, you know that because of the low retention of this grinder that it is almost exactly the same amount of ground coffee.
- Change grind setting without wasting coffee or damaging the grinder. Most conical grinders require that the grinder be running (grinding) while you make adjustments to the grind size. This is because if you change the distance between the burrs (which is what you do when you change the grind setting) and there are beans in between them this causes stress on the burr holding mechanisms and the grind adjustment mechanisms. At the speed at which the Sette grinds, running the grinder while making an adjustment results in a lot of wasted fresh coffee. If your hopper is empty, because this grinder has little or no retention, you do not need to run the grinder to make adjustments.
Finding the right grind setting takes a bit of trial and error (and wasted coffee), but you get much better at estimating over time. Especially if you always use the same blend or blends roasted to similar degree, you will only need to make minor adjustments to the grind size. A good place to start is number 8 on the coarse setting and E (the middle of the fine setting). If the flow of espresso is too fast, you want to go finer, and if the flow is too slow, you want to go coarser. The espresso range on my grinder is in the coarse settings 9, 8, and 7, depending on the coffee used. I go over the adjustment workflow in other chapters.
Set the timer to somewhere around 3 seconds using the up and down arrows on the front of the grinder. Place the portafilter on the forks of the grinder and ensure the basket is centered so that the grounds evenly mostly on the center of the basket. This is very important; if you have more coffee on one side of the basket than the other the resulting espresso does not taste great and flows faster than it should: some coffee grounds end up extracting too much and others too little.
When single dosing 19 grams the first time you press Play gives you a bit more than half of the dose, the second time you press play gives you almost the entire dose, but a few stubborn beans take a little longer so you have to press it a third time to get the full 19 grams, but you can stop after half a second of that third phase. What this enables you to do is put about half the dose on the portafilter, then tap it against the tamping mat to settle it on the basket, and then add the remaining coffee so the mountain of grounds does not spill out of the basket making a mess of your counter, as it would if you grind it all at once.
When you are done adding all the coffee, tap the portafilter again on the tamping mat or on the counter on top of a cloth. This should leave you with a little mountain of coffee in the center that is not much taller than on the sides. I use my finger to level the top of it (bring some coffee over to the sides). The grinder does a fantastic job at creating a “volcano” of grounds, a cylinder around the center of the basket, so this is all the work I find I need to do to get consistently good espresso.
I find that with the Sette and this procedure, stirring the grounds is not necessary. This saves a lot of time and hassle. If you try this with another grinder that does not make a nice “volcano” of grounds around the center of the basket you will run into a lot of inconsistent espressos. The Sette does an excellent job of distributing the grinds on the basket; I believe this is an underappreciated feature of this grinder.
I will discuss more details of the espresso making process in other pages, and I will also add some videos where some of these ideas are easier to understand.
Conclusion
The Baratza Sette is a great grinder for espresso at home. When using fresh coffee roasted for espresso, it can deliver great flavors and consistent flow with little effort. Unless you are a very advanced coffee expert and have some extra cash to burn, there is no real need to spend more on a home espresso grinder.
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Great Espresso at Home 