High-quality burrs. Great for a low-consumption household. Very attractive on the counter. Also nice for grinding up small samples of different coffees you want to learn to distinguish, since no coffee grounds get hung up inside. (Say, for instance, you're a home roaster...)
Negative Product Points
Takes elbow grease and time to grind. If you
drink more than a pot or two a day, this grinder might get old fast.
Probably wouldn't work for espresso; its finest grind is actually perfect for my steam-powered "espresso" maker.
Detailed Commentary
This Italian hand grinder is sold at sweetmarias.com along with the Zassenhaus models. I haven't used a Zass, so I can't compare directly, but the price is comparable and Tom (the proprietor of sweetmarias) says that the burr quality is also comparable. I trust Tom on this. This means that it should last a long, long time.
The grounds collect in a large screw-on hopper on the bottom. You can dump the grounds directly into your press pot or drip maker. The cool thing about this is that not a single coffee ground lands on the counter. Nor is there any place inside the grinder for the coffee to get hung up and stale, if you care about that. Also, the grind adjustment is always locked down, and doesn't wander at all, so once you find the grind you like, you can set & forget.
The grind is extremely consistent from day to day, but it's not quite as even as I thought it would be (there's more sludge in my press pot than I'd hoped, but I'm nonetheless happy with it). I'd like to see it go head-to-head with a Zass to see which does a more even grind. Maybe my expectations were too high, but I give it a 4 for output/quality just to be conservative.
