Burr Grinder Black

When this grinder came out of the box it worked great. Easy to use, consistant grinding, good portion control. If it had continued to operate like that over the six months or so that I've had it I'd have been thrilled.... BUT: This thing needs CONSTANT cleaning. It's packed full of right angles and deep, tight corners that trap ground coffee in a way that I have never seen, nor that I could have even imagined. Once a layer of coffee oil gets established in this thing it has the potential to have coffee build up so quickly, deeply and thickly that it will obstruct the flow of ground coffee, eliminating the ability of the grinder to dispense a consistant volume of ground coffee on any given setting. I haven't collected and weighed the coffee that collects and clogs up this machine, but it seems, in all honesty to be about a half pound or so over the course of a week. I like to play with my gadgets and toys. I like to keep them in good working order and I don't mind frequent cleanings, but this thing is just ridiculous. It literally needs to be cleaned after each and every use, and due to the design, this means emptying out all the whole beans from the hopper, carrying the thing to the sink and digging around firstly with the enclosed brush and then feeling out the corners with a section of bamboo skewer while I watch unused coffee pile up into a mountain in the bottom of my sink, the back of my hand, my forearm and my kitchen floor before I hit it with the brush to get the last bits out (but there is no way to clean out any residual coffee oils, so...). I've included a photo of today's wasted mountain of coffee resulting from my regular cleaning out of the machine. ...Another half pound (probably more) of coffee quite literally down the drain. At eight bucks per pound, I suspect that in the time I've had this... thing I've watched about one and a half times its sale price worth of coffee go down my drain (and across my floor, countertops, into the water reservoir of my coffee maker...). Wait. Scratch that. This thing is garbage. Half a swig of backwashed coffee is worth well more than this grinder, if we are really getting into "value". The coffee grounds that I lose when the static charge they've received from the grinding process causes them to literally jump out of the ground coffee receiving hopper to every conceivable corner of my kitchen countertops every damn day are worth more than this piece of... Well, you can tell where I'm going. Save your money- dump your coffee on the floor, put on a good pair of hard soled shoes and stomp on it 'till the grounds look right. This method might not give you as even a grind, but the waste will probably be about the same and your cost will feel much more fair. At least you won't feel robbed. This was in all likelihood the single worst coffee investment in my entire life.