- Today we're gonna find
out which is the best,
dirt cheap, hand grinder.
What do we have here?
Well, I went out, I went
to Amazon, as you do,
and I bought five hand grinders,
and I thought they were a nice spread
of what's available right now.
So we have the Rhino Coffee
Gear, little hand grinder,
we have the Porlex Mini,
we've got the classic,
probably the bestselling cheap
hand grinder of all time,
which is the Hario Slim.
On Amazon, the top search came out
for the Henry Charles hand grinder.
Never heard of that,
no idea what that was,
so I picked that up,
and then I also went and saw
what was very popular in the US,
which is the JavaPresse.
Pressay?
Presse?
Presse.
And I picked up one of those as well.
What I'm gonna do is break them
down into various categories
and award them scores, and at end wrap up
into what I would give
as my recommendation
of the best, cheap hand grinder out there.
The sensible place to
start would be price,
and there's some funny prices here,
but that's Amazon for you.
So the Rhino Coffee Gear
was 31 pounds and 64 pence.
The Porlex, relatively
expensive at 57 pounds.
Now I already owned this
Hario Slim, this is mine,
but it would cost 28 pounds and 89 pence.
The, what is it, Henry
Charles thing, is 25,99,
and the JavaPresse, we're
gonna call it the JavaPresse,
that is 70 pounds in the UK.
Now here's an important
thing I have to talk about
right off the bat.
I bought these knowing
they looked similar,
but having had them turn up,
they really do appear
completely identical.
I suspect they're gonna do
very similarly in testing.
So a little bit frustrating
that they are so similar,
that they are basically the same.
I suspect exactly the same
factory put these out,
with just two different brands on them.
But that's what we've got.
That's what we're testing today.
And we're gonna take the
best one of these forwards
into the next review of hand grinders,
which is the ultimate hand grinder.
Which is the very best hand
grinder that money can buy?
And we'll see how a
cheap grinder stacks up
against the best in the world.
Points-wise,
more points for cheaper,
in this situation.
So I think it would be five,
four,
three,
two
and one point over here.
Let's move into the next,
and one of the most
important categories for me,
which is build quality.
So starting with the Rhino Coffee Gear,
it is well-intentioned,
but I will say a little bit
sloppy in its execution,
in its build.
Just feels a little cheap.
And they've done things that are nice,
like instead of just
having the stainless steel
slide onto another piece
of stainless steel,
there are these little
plastic insert points here,
so this should fit nice and snugly.
However, down at the bottom here,
this feels loose.
It doesn't feel like it's
a particularly good fit.
I know you're supposed to grip at the top,
but it feels very easy
to split the grinder
when you're holding it,
and that just doesn't feel fantastic.
Stainless steel, as most of them are.
Nice little rubber band.
But just a little bit sloppy.
And so onto the Porlex,
which is pretty well-built, to be honest.
Everything fits quite nicely.
This is stainless steel
onto stainless steel,
but the parts fit well.
Same with the base.
It feels secure.
It goes in deep enough
that it doesn't feel like
it's gonna move around.
Overall,
yeah,
pretty well built.
Now, the Hario is unusual here
because it is a plastic construction.
For better or worse,
is different to the
approach of the others.
It means this chamber is all see-through.
This is a robust plastic.
I've traveled with these
all around the world.
I don't particularly
worry about damaging it,
but does it feel as
nice as stainless steel?
Well actually to me, it kind of does.
Now if you really prefer
stainless steel, that's fine.
There's nothing particularly
premium to me about that
kind of brushed stainless steel,
and there's nothing
particularly premium about
this kind of plastic.
It's well-built, it all
fits together neatly.
This screws into place, I
suppose, which is a nice aspect,
instead of sliding or clicking on.
It's much more secure in its build.
But it's plastic.
Now the Henry Charles, well, it's okay.
It's not bad.
It's light.
It's not a particularly,
it doesn't feel particularly strong.
There's a little plastic insert here.
I don't really know why,
I don't know why you'd put a window there,
but we'll talk about that
when it comes to usability.
Overall,
yeah, entirely fine.
It doesn't feel expensive.
It doesn't feel like a
particularly thick gauge.
This,
little slidey.
I can't imagine it falling off,
but it's not secure in that regard,
and to be honest, the
JavaPresse is identical
in every
single
way.
So for that round I'll award
the Porlex five points,
the Hario Slim
four,
the two identical, the Henry
Charles and the JavaPresse,
I'll give them both three points,
and the Rhino Gear, I thought,
was just the sloppiest build
so I'll give that
two.
One of the main reasons
people buy these things is
to travel with them.
I certainly had one in my luggage
as I've traveled around the
world, and stayed in Airbnbs,
and just wanted to make
some coffee in the morning.
So
how do they all do
for portability?
And so, bringing them
all back for a second,
well, we need to talk about size.
Now this thing, the
Rhinowares is the biggest,
which is probably the least
desirable in a portable grinder,
and the Porlex is by far the smallest.
Now the neat thing
about the Porlex is that
the rubber band comes with a place
for you to store your crank handle,
because otherwise that's just
gonna float around freely,
as it would do with every other grinder.
There's nowhere to put these
when you take them off.
You need to take them off for traveling.
So that's a bit frustrating.
This rubber band is a nice,
little detail on the Porlex
that really ups its portability.
Again, plastic construction
means I worry a lot less,
throwing this thing in a bag,
about what not only is hitting it,
but what it might be hitting.
I don't really worry
about damage that way,
or I might worry a little bit more
about throwing something
stainless steel into a bag
with other potentially fragile things.
I'm a sloppy and hurried packer of things.
I'll admit it.
These two, yeah, fine.
Perfectly portable.
Somewhere in the middle.
So, probably the most points
again are five for the Porlex,
I'd go a four for the Slim,
three points apiece here, and again,
just two points to our friend
the Rhino coffee grinder.
For the next part of testing
we're gonna do the obvious thing.
We're gonna grind.
We're gonna brew some coffee.
This will let us do
both usability testing,
how do they feel to use,
as well as taste testing,
at the end of that.
We're gonna grind at
two different settings.
We're gonna grind firstly
to brew a
20
to
330-style pour-over.
And I'm gonna go a little finer
and aim for a faster brew time.
There's always an issue with
uniformity in hand grinder,
especially cheap hand grinders,
and going a little finer
and faster, by and large,
for me is a better way
to get a better tasting
brew than going coarser
and dealing with the much,
much, much larger pieces
that come with that.
However, I do wanna grind a bit coarser
to see at what point the grind
distribution falls to pieces.
So now let's grind a lot of coffee.
So we brewed five cups of coffee
and in that time it's given me a chance to
get my head around these
grinders a little bit more
from a usability perspective,
and there's a few things
I want to talk about.
So let's start at the
beginning with the Rhino.
It's hopper holds around
30 grams of coffee,
which isn't the biggest of them.
It's actually the second smallest of them.
The smallest actually is the Porlex,
which held only about 25 grams,
which actually might be an issue for me.
Now I would brew when traveling
up to a 1/2 liter batch,
so 30 grams to every 500.
This would frustrate me at 25,
which is really where it topped out.
However, it felt very nice to use.
The handles on all of them were fine.
The Hario holds up to about 40 grams
of coffee in the top hopper,
and actually the shape with the wider top,
makes it much, much, much easier
to fill, which is a bonus.
However, when you are grinding,
it can feel like the beans inside
are sloshing around in there,
and you're just worrying
that the beans aren't
funneling down the way that
they would do with slimmer grinders.
There wasn't a massive
issue in grind time,
though I got stuck a few
more times with the Hario.
That was interesting to me.
These two here,
may as well talk about
them as if they're one.
They both hold about 40 grams too.
Shape, style, fine.
Now,
the bottom of these has the little window.
I have no idea why you
would put a window in.
I get that with plastic, it's plastic.
I can just see in, and that's nice.
Why would I not make it
see-through if it's plastic?
But here, adding in another piece
actually is kind of annoying.
One, because I don't need to
see how much coffee's in there
or if there's coffee in there.
I'm gonna put all the
coffee I need in the top,
grind it and then use it.
So I don't get the point of a window.
But the way that it's constructed,
one, you've got another breakable.
Two, something that's a
little bit harder to clean.
I'd rather everything be stainless steel,
if it's gonna be stainless steel
or everything be plastic, if it's plastic.
But also the way that
it's mounted inside the stainless steel.
There's this ridge around the edge,
and coffee was getting
stuck in that little ridge,
fines would accumulate there.
So, all in all I did not
like the construction
inside of that thing.
When you look at them,
it looks like they're all
using an identical burrs head.
The burrs look very,
very similar in terms of
their teeth configuration,
their cutting edges.
The Hario's is a different color.
The rest of them are
these white, ceramic ones.
This is a grayish, darker ceramic color.
They all
are stepped.
They all have clicky adjustments.
However, the Rhino's
steps were much smaller,
so you could be more
precise with this one.
The rest of them were
really pretty similar.
And then I brewed them.
So like I said, 20 grams to
about three, three, three
of water in the top, so 60
grams per liter, as a ratio.
All of them brewed and drew
down in a very similar time.
The Hario was a little bit
quicker, which was interesting
'cause I'd wondered if I
was grinding finer on it,
because I got caught a few more times.
I got a little bit stuck
grinding a couple more times
on the Hario.
I wondered if that was
'cause I was going finer,
but actually it drew down
five or 10 seconds quicker.
These have all been sitting, cooling down,
getting ready for me to taste.
And I'm gonna be tasting
for a couple of things.
Obviously, I want it to be good,
the coffee that's coming
out of these things,
but I'm really considering
uniformity of grounds,
and so an uneven extraction
from very different particle sizes
would manifest in both
unpleasant bitterness
as well as unpleasant sourness.
So the very tiny pieces you
might get would contribute
in terms of bitterness, the very coarse,
bouldery pieces will make
the brew taste extra sour.
They all brewed in a very
similar time, as I said,
so we should have
relatively matching cups.
Same bloom, same total pour time.
All of those kind of
things were consistent.
So,
now it's time
to taste.
Hmm.
Hmm.
So I'll say
now the range between
the best and the worst
isn't huge.
Not shocking 'cause the price
range isn't particularly wide
in these things, but
the worst to the best,
not an enormous gap.
All of these coffees are okay.
Nothing is wow!
Nothing is undrinkably
terrible or hugely problematic.
These
have
a sort of souriness
from, you know, it tastes
like there're a few more
bigger pieces that didn't
really play the game as much.
This is just a little weaker,
just a little less
extracted than the others,
so it would stand to reason
that I was maybe a touch coarser
than I thought I was on this.
It doesn't have that,
a bunch of it was okay
and then a bunch of it was really coarse.
It has, everything was
just a little coarse,
and fining it up would make it okay.
Make a good, decent cup of coffee.
These are the best two cups for me.
I'm aware that tasting in this manner
is deeply, deeply unscientific
and not particularly good,
especially when they
taste as close as they do.
They're really, really
very, very similar cups.
I might say this and then you
could switch the cups around
and I might say that.
Really not much in it.
Both
decent, quite sweet.
Not too much
sourness.
Really not too much bitterness either.
Does it compare to an EK43?
Does it compare to even the Wilfa Uniform?
No.
You can definitely tell there's
a spread of particle sizes.
That is somewhat inevitable
with cheaper hand grinders.
This is where the better coffees were.
This was sort of in the middle,
and then this, these two, this grinder,
they're kind of the same thing, right,
was
the least tasty of them for me.
I would be happy to travel with these.
I've certainly happy to travel with this,
or have been in the past.
These, whoa.
Not quite as much.
So let's award maximum points,
medium points,
less points over here.
It's summary time.
So on paper the Porlex wins it.
On build,
on portability,
on grind quality.
But, that capacity, it might
be a sticking point for me,
and someone else watching this.
It just might be a little too small.
The Rhinoware I liked a lot,
the better grind control,
the good quality of grinds for the price.
Yeah, it's a good little grinder.
Again, not huge capacity, but good.
Little bit cheaper, the Hario.
It's the middle-of-the-road all-rounder.
There's a reason this is
so incredibly popular.
I actually like the plastic construction.
There's advantages to the shape.
For the money, it grinds pretty well.
It's not a surprising, popular choice.
These two here, if it's at this price,
if it's 25,99, and I think
in the US it is much cheaper
for the JavaPresse, then it's just,
you getting what you pay for.
It's not very good.
It has a bunch of frustrations for me,
in terms of the build.
It didn't produce great-tasting coffee.
I'm not an enormous fan of this.
I probably wouldn't recommend these.
I think there are better
options at a cheaper,
or a higher, price.
So on paper, probably the Porlex takes it.
Little bit more thoughtful,
but certainly a little bit more expensive.
But I will say that at
this kind of price point,
there just aren't enormous
differences in the quality
of grind that you're getting,
so you may want to consider
some other factors.
These were bought thanks to
the support of my Patreon.
If you want to be involved,
I'd love to see you there.
The support means I can
go and buy these products,
not have to rely on manufacturers,
and I can tell the truth.
I can tell you what I
like and what I don't.
All of these will be given away now,
including the one that I
bought myself some time ago,
but I'll give it away too.
These are gonna go to Patreon backers,
who've entered a little competition,
and they'll be getting an
email from me very soon,
letting them know who's won,
and little packages of delight,
including these grinders,
will be going in the mail to them.
What we'll do is we will
take the Porlex forwards
to the next round,
and the next round is gonna be
the ultimate hand grinder showdown.
Budget's irrelevant here.
We're gonna buy the best
hand grinders we can,
we're gonna compare them,
and see how they compare
to something that wins the cheap category.
Let me know your thoughts
then on the comments below.
Let me know a grinder
that I cannot miss in that
ultimate hand grinder showdown.
As always, thank you so much for watching.
Hope you have a great day.
