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La Pavoni PA-Burr Coffee Grinder, White |
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Your price: $39.98
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- Grinds coffee beans with powerful burr action for drip coffee and espresso
- 18 grind levels
- Hopper holds up to 1/4 pound of beans
- Dial allows cup settings from 1 to 12
- Hand wash or wipe clean
Terrible Service
Rating: 
This grinder has been fairly good to me. However, it's very difficult to change courseness settings (espeially from course to fine, since the burrs themselves are moving against residual coffee grounds) amd I would prefer to have numbers on the dial instead of different size dots, since it's easier to remember the number, e.g. for expresso grind, than the exact size of the dot. Also the courseness setting has a tenedency to move itself over time to other settings, due to the machine's vibrations.
Now I am trying to get a replacement bin for the bottom, which has been gradually chipping apart form the least 3 years. The distributor, European Gift of Mt. Vernon insists that I order from a list of retailiers, all of whom do not stock the parts. Now back to Square 1.
With a...grinder, it seems that one can never expect to buy parts.
Good Espresso after tweaking
Rating: 
As others have commented, this grinder does not grind fine enough for espresso out of the box. However, it is fairly easy to tweak the grinder to go finer. I can now grind fine enough to choke my espresso machine.
To tweak: simply undo the three screws inside the bean hopper. Lift the top off. Adjust the setting to 1 (finest), then lift the adjusting wheel out and reposition to a new setting (I used 7). Reassemble the machine, and now you can go several steps finer. I use a setting four or five steps past 1 for my espresso.
I am not a coffee snob, but I do enjoy the taste of the 25 second espresso shots that I have achieved with the tweaked grinder.
Ack - broken AGAIN
Rating:
I consider myself a coffee snob - so weigh my opinions accordingly. For my residence I use excellent equipment, but for my vacation cottage I just can't justify spending [a lot] on a grinder - so I bought one of these little things. La Pavoni has HISTORICALLY had a great name in the espresso world, so I figured it would be a passable [less expensive] burr grinder.
...you get what you pay for. This is not, in any way, a well made grinder and 'passable' may be overly kind.
I am now on my third one, it gets used intensivly one weekend in 10 and I have only been using them for a year. The burr mechanism is a flat parallel design which has a tendency to overheat the beans as it grinds. Further, the entire mechanism depends on a single small nylon gear which has been the failing point of each one I have owned.
It generates static such that you have to brush the ground catcher after every use and with fresh roasted coffee (we use a Hearthware) it is unusually tortuously inconsistant; it cannot handle Colombain Excelsio grade beans as they are too large.
In all, this little thing is a REAL disappointment. After doing a little research, it turns out this is just a rebadged OEM from a "European" manufacturer. Not the best use of [my money].
