First serious filter grinder
Baratza Encore
The best-supported entry burr grinder for drip, pour-over, French press and cold brew — genuinely repairable, genuinely consistent, and genuinely incapable of espresso.
- Grind consistency
- 7.5
- Adjustment range
- 6
- Retention
- 6.5
- Build
- 7.5
- Value
- 9
Pros
- 40 steps cover every filter method cleanly, with meaningful differences between clicks
- Grind uniformity across the medium range is well above blade grinders and most cheap electrics
- Every part is replaceable and documented — burrs, motor, gearbox, switch
- Gear-reduced DC motor runs slower and cooler than the high-RPM motors in cheap grinders
- Simple front pulse button makes single-dosing straightforward
Cons
- Cannot grind fine enough for espresso on a non-pressurized basket
- Plastic housing and hopper feel basic next to metal-bodied rivals
- Stepped-only adjustment gives no micro-tuning between clicks
- Conical burr and chute retain a few grams, so single-dosers need to purge
- Loud, in the way most gear-reduced grinders are
Don't buy this if…
…espresso is anywhere in your plans. The standard Encore's finest setting is still too coarse to build proper resistance in a real espresso basket, and no adjustment or modification changes that — the Encore ESP exists precisely for this reason.
What the 40 settings actually get you.The Encore’s range runs from a coarse cold-brew grind down to a fine drip grind, and the useful part is that the steps are spaced sensibly across that range rather than bunched at one end. Moving one click genuinely changes your brew, which sounds obvious until you use a 12-setting grinder where half the clicks do nothing you can taste. For pour-over in particular this is what you want: enough granularity to chase a target brew time without a stepless dial you can get lost on.
The motor is the quiet engineering story. Cheap electric grinders spin fast because a fast motor is cheap; fast grinding generates heat and more fines. The Encore uses a DC motor with gear reduction, so the burrs turn slowly with high torque. That is why its grind is more uniform than the price suggests and why it copes with a full hopper without bogging down.
Repairability is the real feature. Burr sets, the gearbox, the motor, the switch and the hopper are all available as parts, with published instructions. A ten-year-old Encore with fresh burrs performs like a new one, and burrs are the only consumable. That changes the value calculation completely against a sealed grinder that becomes landfill when one component fails.
The espresso ceiling, stated plainly.The Encore’s burrs and adjustment range were tuned for filter. At its finest setting it produces something close to a moka-pot grind, which will pass water through an espresso basket too quickly to build 9 bars of resistance — you get a fast, thin, sour shot. This is not a defect; it is a design choice, and Baratza sells the Encore ESP with different burrs and a finer range for exactly that job. If you have any intention of pulling espresso, buy the ESP and skip this one.
Living with it.Expect a few grams of retention in the chute, which matters if you switch beans often — purge a small dose when you change. Static is normal with a plastic bin; a drop of water stirred into the beans before grinding (the Ross Droplet Technique) largely eliminates it. And clean the burr chamber every few weeks, because rancid oil residue is the most common cause of a grinder that “suddenly tastes off.”
Price as of Sep 2, 2026. Prices change — Amazon's at checkout is the one that counts.
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