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See why.The Best Blade Grinders of 2023
Mornings can be difficult; grinding coffee should be easy, fast, and fuss-free. Could we find a blade grinder that delivered?
We tested three new blade grinders. The Krups Coffee and Spice Grinder remains our winner.
Top Picks
See Everything We Tested
What You Need To Know
Coffee aficionados will tell you that a good grinder is critical to getting the best cup of coffee, claiming that all the coffee particles need to be about the same size to get a smooth, even brew free of overly bitter or harsh flavors. To achieve this, coffee shops and dedicated home brewers often use burr grinders, a style of coffee grinder that works like a pepper mill and forces each bean to pass through a set of metal rings called burrs. The best of these machines can produce an extremely even grind, allowing baristas to provide consistent cups of coffee to their customers day after day.
Many people instead choose blade grinders, which are compact and cost a fraction of the price. These work like tiny food processors, with a blade that spins to chop the coffee beans. The longer you hold down the button, the finer the coffee gets. But which blade grinder is best? To find out, we rounded up some promising models, using each to grind enough beans to make one, four, and 10 cups of coffee. We used the grinders to achieve a fine, medium, and coarse grind with both light-roasted and dark-roasted beans. Finally, we had six testers—ranging from novices to coffee experts—operate each grinder to gauge its user-friendliness.
Pulse, Shake, Repeat: How to Use a Blade Grinder
Which grind size you aim for depends on your brew method: coarse grind for French press, medium grind for drip machines, and fine grind for espresso. However, with our lineup of blade grinders, we found that simply holding down the “on” button until some of the coffee looked to be the right consistency often led to uneven results, with powdery clumps of overprocessed coffee interspersed with untouched whole beans. In the coffee industry, the powdery bits are called fines and the underprocessed beans are known as boulders. While we've learned that grind evenness isn't the only factor in brewing good coffee, leaving whole beans in your brew basket is a waste—those unprocessed beans are too big to add any flavor in the short time it takes to brew a pot of coffee.
Christopher Hendon, assistant professor of computational materials chemistry at the University of Oregon and author of Water for Coffee (2015), told us that if you simply hold down the grind button, some beans end up overground, while others never come in contact with the blade. “There's a floating effect, where the big pieces float on top of the swirling fines and never get broken down,” Hendon said. To combat this, experts recommend pulsing the grind button and shaking the grinder in between pulses to redistribute the grounds.
We adopted a pattern of shaking the grinder in between 1-second pulses. For some...
Everything We Tested
Highly Recommended
- Cleanup: 3 stars out of 3.
- Capacity: 3 stars out of 3.
- Grinding: 3 stars out of 3.
- Ease of Use: 3 stars out of 3.
Recommended
- Cleanup: 2.5 stars out of 3.
- Capacity: 2.5 stars out of 3.
- Grinding: 2.5 stars out of 3.
- Ease of Use: 3 stars out of 3.
- Cleanup: 3 stars out of 3.
- Capacity: 3 stars out of 3.
- Grinding: 2.5 stars out of 3.
- Ease of Use: 2 stars out of 3.
This model was simple to use and consistently produced good results with relatively even grinding and no boulders. It was easy to clean. It came with two detachable grinding chambers. One of them was described as the “chopper bowl”; it has four blades and is meant for chopping wet ingredients, such as garlic, onion, and herbs. We used the chamber meant for grinding dry ingredients for the coffee tests. The process for grinding coffee was fussy and took longer than we’d like; we also couldn’t see into the chamber to monitor our progress. This two-step process slowed us down a bit and the double-lid setup obscured our visual into the grinding process.
Recommended with reservations
- Cleanup: 3 stars out of 3.
- Capacity: 3 stars out of 3.
- Grinding: 1.5 stars out of 3.
- Ease of Use: 2 stars out of 3.
This roomy grinder easily accommodated 10 cups' worth of coffee beans with room to spare, but it sometimes left whole beans unprocessed. Its blade sat relatively high in the grinding chamber, which likely resulted in the unprocessed beans. Despite this, even when full, it made quick work of processing the beans, and its grind button was responsive and easy to push. Its domed lid made it a bit harder to watch the grind, since the curve of the plastic distorted the view.
- Cleanup: 1.5 stars out of 3.
- Capacity: 3 stars out of 3.
- Grinding: 1.5 stars out of 3.
- Ease of Use: 3 stars out of 3.
This grinder was significantly quieter than many, as advertised, and it was easy to use. It just didn’t grind coffee as well as we’d like. Perhaps because its unusual blade was only loosely attached to the center of the unit, it ground beans somewhat unevenly, with an average yield of medium-size pieces. As with other models with removable chambers, coffee grounds sprayed up and over the chamber and some were trapped near the bottom of the base. We also noticed that superfine grounds accumulated around the bottom edges of the chamber, becoming cakey and hard to clean.
Not Recommended
- Cleanup: 2 stars out of 3.
- Capacity: 3 stars out of 3.
- Grinding: 1 stars out of 3.
- Ease of Use: 2 stars out of 3.
This sleek-looking model had an especially large capacity: It can hold about 100 grams of coffee beans in its tall main chamber. It also comes with an additional, much smaller, grinding chamber for spices. But the unit was a pain to operate, requiring us to push hard on the chamber to grind. We also couldn’t see into the chamber easily to monitor progress. And it just didn’t grind well, yielding boulders of various sizes, a small percentage of usable medium-size grinds, and even one or two unground beans. It was a bit hard to clean, as the tall chamber made it difficult to reach down to wipe out the residual grinds.
- Cleanup: 2 stars out of 3.
- Capacity: 1 stars out of 3.
- Grinding: 2 stars out of 3.
- Ease of Use: 1.5 stars out of 3.
- Cleanup: 1 stars out of 3.
- Capacity: 3 stars out of 3.
- Grinding: 1.5 stars out of 3.
- Ease of Use: 1 stars out of 3.
- Cleanup: 1 stars out of 3.
- Capacity: 3 stars out of 3.
- Grinding: 1.5 stars out of 3.
- Ease of Use: 1 stars out of 3.
Reviews you can trust
The mission of America’s Test Kitchen Reviews is to find the best equipment and ingredients for the home cook through rigorous, hands-on testing.
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