GRINDERS · BARATZA VIRTUOSO+ · FIT

$250, for an entry level grinder. I owned one for years, it never once let me down, and I would still tell you to buy the cheaper one.

If you already know this is the one you want, it is here, two hundred and fifty dollars, the same as it cost me. Otherwise, the rest is why I would think about it first.

This is not a bad grinder and I want that said plainly before anything else. I owned it for years, it worked the whole time, and I gave it away in working order. What happened is that I changed and it didn't.

One thing worth saying before the alternatives, because it decides what you can actually buy. The Virtuoso+ on sale today is the grinder I owned, and it is still two hundred and fifty dollars. Baratza's own parts listing puts the same M2 conical burr in it and in the Encore, so the grinding I lived with is the grinding you would be buying. It is also the grinding the cheaper one does, which is most of what follows.

If you are getting started, get the Baratza Encore. A hundred and fifty dollars.

This is the one I actually recommend and I am not hedging it. It is plainer, it does not look as flashy, and it does without the little creature comforts, which is exactly why it costs less. Same burrs, same settings, same coffee in the cup. And here is the real reason to buy the cheap one: you are going to outgrow it anyway. I owned one. It ran my coffee club at a job I no longer have, and it did the work. A hundred and fifty dollars is a fair price to get into this, find out what you like and find out what you don't, on a machine you will not feel bad about leaving behind.

If espresso is genuinely where you are headed, there is the Encore ESP at two hundred dollars.

I have not owned this one, so take it for what it is. It is the same family with the grind resolution pushed down toward the fine end. But I want to be honest about what you are signing up for, because the grinder is the small half of it. Espresso is a different game. It is beans chosen for it, it is time spent dialing, it is a lot of throwing shots away while you learn. If you are not sure you want that, this is not the place to spend the extra fifty dollars.

If you are willing to grind by hand, the KINGrinder K6, about a hundred and ten dollars.

This is the one where the coffee actually got interesting for me again. The grinds come out fluffier and I could follow what was in the cup. It covers everything, espresso and Turkish at one end, French press and pour over at the other, so it is not a narrow tool. The drawback is the obvious one and it is every morning: you have to grind it yourself. That is not nothing. A fast electric grinder is a real convenience and this asks for your arm instead. Only you know whether you want to make that trade before your first coffee of the day.

Two I would not send you to, and why.

There is a three hundred dollar version of the Encore. I would not buy it. At three hundred dollars you are close enough to grinders that go somewhere else entirely, and those are more likely to be up your alley by the time you are spending that much. And if you have heard that you need the kind of separation a ZP6 gives you, I did not need that and I would not tell you that you do. I was not chasing the ceiling. I just wanted a cup that told me something about the coffee.

I had the Encore first. It worked, it ran my coffee club, and it never gave me a reason to complain about it.

I bought this one in January of 2020.

I was brewing every day, and I wanted something that looked like it belonged on the counter. Something presentable and well made that would just go when I pressed it. The Virtuoso+ was that. Better build, better button, a nicer object in every way I could see from the outside.

That was the whole reason. It was not a grind quality decision, because at the time I did not know enough to make one.

And once I was living with it, one feature did the work and the rest were decoration. The timer on the front. Press it, it runs for thirty or forty seconds, you walk away. That is what I cherished about that machine, every single morning. The lights down in the grounds bin, the better feet, whichever of those came up in the marketing, I could not tell you the last time I thought about them. The thing you use daily is almost never the thing on the box, and it is worth knowing which one you are paying for.

Nothing, for a long while, and that was fine.

It was easy to change parts on, which I came to appreciate more than I expected. Baratza sells all of it separately and puts the repair videos out themselves, and people modify these things. Dialing in was easy, the adjustment had a feel to it, and moving between coffees was never a chore.

What I did notice early was that most of the dial was decoration. It goes to forty clicks and I never had a reason to leave the stretch between about twenty six and ten or twelve. Even French press lived in there. That is not a Baratza problem specifically, most grinders are like this, but the number on the machine is a lot bigger than the number you will use.

None of that is a complaint, and if you want to see the current one it is still being sold and it is still two hundred and fifty dollars. The complaint comes later.

This is the section that matters.

After a while every coffee started tasting the same to me. Light roast, medium roast, it stopped mattering. It had a nice concentrated burst of flavour up front and then it would fade out, and that is not a bad way to drink coffee at all. But it was muddy. Everything came through blended together, and I could not decipher what I was actually tasting. The bag would tell me there were three things in there and I would get all three at once in a lump, or none of them.

Dark roast was the exception. Darker coffees did come through better on it. Everything else flattened.

So I did what everybody does. I assumed it was me. Then I went after the water chemistry. Then technique, the brewer, the ratio, the temperature. I isolated everything I could isolate and I kept arriving at the same cup.

It was the grinder. Not broken, not badly made, but it has a profile, and the profile was what I was tasting on every coffee I ran through it. You would think a grinder is agnostic, that it just breaks the coffee up and hands it over. It isn't.

And here is the part that bothers me looking back. When everything arrives tasting the same, you do not blame the grinder. You blame the coffee. I called bags crap that probably were not crap at all. That is not fair to the coffee and it is not fair to your own experience, and the grinder is what put me in that position without ever announcing itself.

And I want to be careful about what I was actually missing, because it is easy to make this sound like I needed some high end instrument. I didn't. I did not need the kind of separation a ZP6 gives you. I just needed something a little more interesting, something that told the story of that particular coffee. That is a much lower bar than it sounds like, and this grinder did not clear it for me.

How fast you get there depends on how you brew. Pour-over will expose a grinder faster than anything else, because there is nothing between you and it. On an automatic drip machine, with a splash of cream in the cup, the same grinder can stay perfectly good for years longer. Neither of those is the wrong way to drink coffee. They just run different clocks.

Here is the part that belongs on a page like this rather than in a review. The discovery is on a delay. You do not find this out in week one. You find it out a couple of years in, when your palate has sharpened enough to ask the question, which is long after the return window and long after you have decided the grinder is the reliable part of your setup. For a lot of people the Virtuoso is the first serious grinder they buy. It is the one that feels like graduating. Then it quietly becomes the ceiling.

I gave it away.

A friend of mine did not have a grinder at all, and this one was sitting there doing nothing for me while it could do everything for him. It was working perfectly the day it left my house.

That is the fairest thing I can tell you about it, and it is why I will not call it a bad grinder. It was not the wrong machine. It stopped meshing with how I was growing into this, and it was exactly right for somebody a step behind where I had got to. It went out of favour. That is a different thing from being bad.

Two hundred and fifty dollars is a lot of money for an entry level grinder, and that is what this is. It is the first real grinder for most of the people who buy it.

The complaint I could measure was the price, and that is the one I led with when I talked about this on camera. What I would say now is that the price was never really the point. The point is that this grinder takes you exactly as far as the hundred and fifty dollar one does, and then they both stop in the same place. If that place is fine for you, and for a lot of people it genuinely is, buy the cheaper one and put the hundred somewhere it changes something.

And there is a reason not to buy up front that has nothing to do with money. The time you actually want a new grinder is when you have developed as a coffee person, when you start wanting to venture out. Before that, you probably will not even notice the subtleties a more expensive grinder is giving you. You cannot spend your way to a palate you have not built yet. So you may as well learn on the cheap one, and there is a lot to learn on it.

If you are already there, already tasting the sameness and wondering whether it is you: it is probably not you. Your palate got better. That is good news wearing bad clothes, and it happens to everyone who sticks with this long enough. Don't feel bad about the grinder and don't feel bad about yourself.

Everything on this page carries a link, the Virtuoso included, so I earn either way and have no reason to steer you.

HOW IT SCORES

Does what it claims — 7 / 10

It does what Baratza says it does. The promise is that it simplifies your prep, looks good doing it, and lets you dial in precisely, and it did all three for years without fuss. But look at what the promise actually is. Set your timer to the tenth of a second and dial in your grind with the precision burr. What does that tell you about what ends up in your cup? Not much. At two hundred and fifty dollars you are weighing this against every other grinder at that price, and you deserve more credit than that sentence gives you. Meeting a thin claim is not the same as meeting a real one. What I will say is that one piece of it was true for me every single day, and it was the timer.

Holds up over time — 9 / 10

Bought in January 2020 and used most days for about five years, and it was still working perfectly the day I handed it to a friend. Nothing degraded. And if the burrs ever do go, they are cheap and it is an easy job, which is part of why this number is high.

Worth the Buy — 4 / 10

Overpriced for what it does, and there is a cheaper way to the same result. If what you want is the nicer looking object, that is a real thing to want and this is the nicer object. But the Encore is the better buy, same burrs and same settings for a hundred dollars less. And if you would rather not think about grinders again for a while, the ESP at two hundred makes more sense than this does at two fifty.

Would I buy it again — 4 / 10

No. I know what I would do with the money instead.

60% 24 out of 40. Four things, ten points each.

I brewed on this most days for about five years. That is a heavy use rate and it cuts toward the grinder: the durability number is the strongest thing on this page and it earned it. If you would only reach for a grinder now and then, weigh that nine lighter than I have.

And what I was chasing, so you can correct for me: I did not need the kind of separation a high end grinder gives you. I just needed something a little more interesting, something that told the story of that particular coffee. If that is not what you are after, read all four of these differently.

Scored against what this thing claims to do and what it costs, not against other gear.