Hario Mini Slim Manual Coffee Grinder Review

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There are cheaper manual coffee grinders and they certainly serve a purpose but if you are a coffee lover and you want to get the best possible flavour out of your coffee beans then you’ll notice a significant difference using a quality coffee grinder compared to a low-cost budget grinder.

Certain products give you reassurance from the brand that designs and manufacturers them. When you buy something from Apple there is an expectation of quality and excellence and you are happy to pay a premium for that.

Carefully designed in Japan and manufactured to their specification this is a high-quality grinder that delivers a quality of grind that could expect to pay 4 or 5 times as much for if you decided to go down the road of an electric burr grinder.

When you buy a coffee grinder of this quality it should be considered as an investment rather than just a way to turn coffee beans into ground coffee.

There are other much cheaper coffee grinders but they won’t give you the consistency of grind that you need to produce a high-quality cup of coffee.

Where a blade grinder just chops up your beans and you get grounds of all different sizes a burr grinder will crush your beans and retain all the natural oils in the beans that are an important part of the flavour you get in your cup.

And then there is the quality of the burrs (or disks) themselves and how accurate they are when you adjust the setting to bring the burrs closer together to get a finer grind size or move them further apart to get a coarser grind size.

Different methods of brewing coffee require coffee to be ground differently with espresso requiring the finest grind and cafetiere coffee the most coarse.

This Hario grinder can be adjusted to accommodate all brewing methods by simply moving the adjuster in the grinder accordingly.

First of you just turn the dial as far clockwise as it will go until it can’t turn any more. At that point, the burrs are touching and ready to be moved apart.

Once that’s done you need to turn it a set number of “clicks” anti-clockwise until you get the desired setting for how you like to brew your coffee.

This is a suggestion for some of the popular brewing methods:

• Espresso (very fine) – 1-2 turns anticlockwise
• Moka Pot (fine but not as fine as espresso) – 3-4 turns anti-clockwise
• Aeropress (a bit coarser than a Moka Pot) – 5-6 turns anti-clockwise
• Filter coffee (medium grind) – 7 turns anti-clockwise
• Cafetiere – Coarse grind – 8 turns anti-clockwise

These are just suggestions and you can tweak it to suit your taste but they are going to be pretty close so you can start with those and adjust where you see fit.

Hario is the Apple of manual coffee grinders. They have been around for 100 years and in typical Japanese style attention to detail and precision is at the top of their agenda.

The container that holds the grinds is made of a transparent, strong plastic which I like because although it’s not glass it that would make it feel more expensive, the plastic is more practical because it makes it more portable.

You can bring it with you on your travels and it won’t break when you pack it and it won’t break if you drop it on the floor.

A lot of other manual grinders slide or click into place when you connect the grinds container to the main grinder but this one screws in and that kind of gives it a more premium feel.

The container that holds the ground coffee is transparent and has measuring lines so you know how much coffee has been ground. At level 1 there is 12g of coffee and at level 2 there is 24g of coffee.

The number of cups of coffee that 24g will accommodate will depend on the brewing method that you use.

For espresso you could grind more than the 24g at level 2 on the markings as it will hold up to 40g and then you could get a couple of double espresso’s out of it.

For filter coffee around 7g per cup is about what you need to you’ll get about 5 or 6 cups from one grind.

Verdict

This is an extremely good value for money manual coffee grinder.

It may not be the cheapest one you can buy but it delivers results and consistency normally reserved for coffee grinders that are a lot more expensive.

It will hold up to 40g of coffee beans and the shape of the top makes it easy to add your beans without them spilling out or onto the floor.

From a usability perspective it’s very easy to turn the handle to grind the beans and in about 90 seconds you can have the whole 40 grams ground.

The quality of the grind is excellent and it is fully adjustable for all coffee brewing methods.

An excellent manual coffee grinder that can be used on a daily basis or taken with you to use on the go or on holiday.

Here is a video that shows the Hario in action when compared to other manual grinders of a similar price:

Last update on 2024-04-25 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API