Video Overview | Baratza Sette 270W Weight-Based Conical Burr Coffee Grinder

Transcript

Hey, folks. Steve with Prima Coffee here. Today we're going to look at Baratza's newest weight-based grinder, the Sette 270W. Now we've got a whole lot of really exciting features to get through. I'm going to dive right in. First of which you're going to notice this does not look like any previous Baratza. We've got this great seven shape here. And that's a really neat feature because it allows us to have a straight grinding path from the hopper, through the burrs, and into your container, your portafilter, whatever it is you want to grind in. That's really important because it allows us to have extremely low retention for a couple reasons I'll highlight a little bit later. But for espresso we're seeing less than two grams of retention and for drip coffee we're seeing pretty much none at all, and that is phenomenal for a home grinder. Really, really exciting. And, again, there's so many other great features here. Let's jump right in. We got a 10-ounce Shut-off Hopper up top. If you've seen Baratza Shut-off Hoppers before, they've got this key mechanism that opens and closes the throat of the hopper. So if you're switching beans kind of often, let's say you're pulling a couple of different espressos a week, you can shut off the hopper, pull this off, empty out your beans back into the bag, put in the new ones, purge whatever's left over in the top here, and you're good to go.

Baratza Sette 270W Weight-Based Conical Burr Coffee Grinder

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Weight-based grinding with three customizable presets

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Up front we have our control panel. Again, I said this is a weight-based grinder, so these numbers represent grams. We actually have a scale mechanism built in down below. So I've got three different preset doses I can use. These are customizable. So, for example, I want to have 16 grams instead of 16 and a half. I can change that pretty easily. You'll see that they're changing in tenths of a gram. Below 10 grams, so 9 grams and below, you'll actually have hundreds of a gram. But once you get into the double digits, they're going to be tenths of a gram. To save this dose I just have to hit the preset button and hold it until the screen blinks and now it's saved. So, again, I've got three that doses I can work with. They don't have to be three completely different doses but you've got some versatility here. Some people actually like to set one of their presets to a half gram or one gram. So if they feel like maybe they want to change their shot, you know, just a little bit, they can go hit that preset and just basically pulse grind real quick. We've got our play/pause and our stop buttons down here to control basically the starting and stopping. Play/pause is pretty self-explanatory. You can start and pause your grinding and then resume. So if you want to grind half of your dose into your portafilter, give it a little shake to settle, and then grind the other half, you can do that. Stop will actually reset the counter. So if you feel like you actually just want to change your dose or what have you, you can just stop it and reset the whole thing from there.

And then, of course, the up and down arrows to adjust our dose weight. Now, inside here, I've got 40 millimeter conical steel burrs. They're made by Etzinger. They're Swiss-made, really solid burr set. And we've got 30 macro settings on the adjustment here. Each has a nice distinctive click. And then below that we have Baratza's first ever stepless micro-adjustment. So it's hard to say exactly how many grind setting this equates to because, again, it's stepless. So it's somewhat infinite in terms of within its range, but Baratza estimates about 300 or so. So you've got quite a bit of range on this grinder. Oh, down here near maybe a five to the one is going to be pretty good for espresso settings. Over here, the 30, it's going to be not quite a Chemex course. This isn't a full-range grinder. It's more of a multi-range grinder and we find it works best between espresso and around like a V60 AeroPress, maybe a small Chemex brew. It really depends on the coffees that you're using. It does tend to get a little bit more fines once you hit this coarse range, so you do have to be careful. I probably wouldn't recommend doing a full liter, liter and a half Chemex brew. But you can probably get away with those smaller brews, you know, single maybe or like one or two cups on those three-cup single small Chemexes. Maybe even the six cup model. Again, small brew depends on the coffee that you're using. You do risk a little bit of a retraction or a longer draw down time just because of those fines.

So, again, we find it works best in that espresso range. It's excellent for espresso. But you do have to be careful once you start pushing coarser into that medium drip territory. Now, below that, we have our grindsman, comes with a grinder. This is anti-static, BPA-free plastic. Really great. You won't really have too much leftover behind as long as you keep this guy clean. And then we also have our convertible fork system. Now, if you push in on the right side fork and then rotate, you can switch between portafilter mode, like this, or the grinds catch mode. Portafilter mode also has this adjustable centered fork, so you can adjust that by height, depending on what your portafilter needs. Now, with the W version, it is important to have a nice and sturdy adjustment here. You want to make sure that the portafilter is snug and level so it cuts down on the vibration because the load cell is actually built in behind this whole mechanism here. So if there's too much vibration, it can kind of throw off the censor and you might get some unevenness in your dose consistency. However, if it's nice and snug, if it's adjusted properly, and you do get a wrench to adjust this with the grinder, if everything is adjusted properly, you should be pretty well set to have some really nice and consistent doses, usually within a half of gram up or down from your setting.

Now, another important thing to note based on the steadiness and sturdiness of the grinder, if you have any issues with grind consistency or dose consistency, you're not hitting your target weight or you're going up or down a gram or so on a fairly consistent basis, you do want to make sure that all of the feet on the bottom of the grinder are fully pushed in and that the grinder's on a nice and level surface. So, again, if it's wobbling too much, that could throw off the load cell just like any scale. You just want to make sure that the grinder's nice and sturdy so you can get good, consistent readings and good, consistent doses as you use it. Now I'm actually going to pull the first set out real quick so I can show you one of the more interesting things about the Sette series, just removing the whole carrier here. Now, if you're familiar with grinders, you'll notice that I just pulled out the cone burr as opposed to the ring burr. And that's unique to the Settes and it's a really important characteristic because it allows us to have a couple of really key features. One of those is that low retention that we were speaking about. So we have this straight through grind path. And instead of spinning the cone burr, we're actually spinning the ring burr around it. That means that no other grinding mechanism is in the way of the beans going from whole to crushed and cut and falling into your grinding receptacle. So, again, we have that really low retention. We also have a much faster grinding speed because of it. The ring burr spinning actually helps to pull coffee down through the burrs, gets it nice and chopped up, and eject it at a pretty fast pace.

So, again, we have those really nice and fast doses. We are looking at maybe like four to five seconds for espresso fine, depending on your fineness, and probably about the same, honestly, for a smaller V60 up to maybe six or seven or ten seconds for some of those larger batches. So it just grinds really fast, and part of it is to thank for the ring burr spinning. You will notice this cone burr has kind of a sharper geometry and that's important to note when I pull out this burr. This is the coarse burr that Baratza has started to test out for the Settes, sort of as an alternative to the stock burr that comes with the grinder. Now, as I mentioned, that grind range is a little bit limited once you get to the coarse end of things. However, with this new burr you buy a little bit better consistency once you start getting into that Chemex range. The early feedback is a little bit varied. However, most people seem to be reporting some positive findings in grinding for their Chemex brews, and even into some smaller French press brews. Now this burr is not available quite yet. It does not come with the grinder. This is merely in testing phase currently. However, it does seem to be pretty promising and we hope to see it available in the future. So, again, the grind range is a little bit limited and, unfortunately, the Sette does not have calibration as previous Baratza grinders have. You can insert some shims underneath the cone burr, which is fairly easy to remove, if you need more fineness.

However, you cannot adjust it any coarser. These are nice if you are working with some pressure profiling or something like a slayer where you might have a lower pressure or variable flow rate and you need a bit of a finer grind because of it. But you are not able to adjust that grind range in total towards the coarser end of things, unfortunately. Anyway, let's take a look at how this grinds. I'm going to load it up with a nice, big dose of beans because, again, as a weight-based grinder, we are relying mainly on the grinder, reading the weights in the portafilter or the bin. So we want to have a nice, big helping of beans in the top so it can actually grind enough. This is not going to make a very good single dosing grinder. We actually recommend the timed version for that. However, if you would like to have consistent weight-based dosing, this is a pretty decent option. I'm actually going to purge a little bit first because my grinder was empty. So I'm going to play/pause. I'm not going to talk while this is grinding. And it's going to tear and then go ahead and grind. All right, so obviously that was really quick. We got a lot of beans through in just those three seconds. I'm going to stop and reset that dose.

See, we got a pretty decent amount of coffee there. I'm going to adjust it just a little bit finer. This is not espresso fine, but I'm just going to show you how it works to dose directly into a portafilter here. So I've got it in place, I've got my dose set, and I'm just going to hit Play. And we're getting a little fuller but... So I have, actually you can see on the screen before I grab the portafilter, 12.8 grams already in there in just a second or two. Really, really quick. Again, this is not quite espresso fine. But if I were to dial this in more, you'd have a nice fluffy mound that doesn't really require all that much distributing or playing around with it, de-clumping prior to tamping. We've been really, really happy with the Espresso grinding. Really, really solid, and great flavor for sure in the cup. We've been able to dial in some more finicky kind of Nordic coffees as well as some pretty stellar go-to espresso blends. So a really, really good performer there, and the versatility of being able to grind into either a portafilter or a grindsman like this is really excellent and a great tool to have for brewing at home. So there you have it. That is the Baratza Sette 270W, their newest weight-based dosing grinder. Really, really fun product. Lots of cool features. Couldn't be more excited for it. Thanks so much for watching.