this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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Coffee
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The Magical Fruit
The Oromo people would customarily plant a coffee tree on the graves of powerful sorcerers. They believed that the first coffee bush sprang up from the tears that the god of heaven shed over the corpse of a dead sorcerer.
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A grinder is a pretty simple piece of equipment though, the high pricetags many go for is honstly unjustified IMO. A grinder has been a solved problem for a long time. You don't need to invent anything new to make a great grinder and there's no artisinal skill involved in making a good one either.
A car is a solved problem. So please, buy a used Honda civic and use it to haul 10 tons of stone up a steep incline. Day in and day out.
A bit hyperbolic, but the issue is one of specialization and volume. These grinders see small sales and have very special configurations. To produce something like that costs more money than a spinning wheel grinder. On the other hand it is consistent in scope and output with many issues resolved via many production iterations or through manufacturing processes which are difficult to scale.
Yes at some point the prices to benefit ratio drops, but seriously, grinders (next to the beans themselves) are the most important part in the taste of your coffee. Don’t you feel like you deserve the best?
That's not a bit hyperbolic, it's a full blown straw man argument.
There is nothing inherently expensive in a good grinder, not from an engineering, manufacturing or materials perspective. Sure small volume manufacturing is more expensive, but we're still talking brands making thousands of units and not small one-off productions, so it's not that much more expensive.
I want a good grinder, and I also want to pay for quality. They simply charge more for the equipment than I believe is reasonable, because the amount of work and cost required to produce the product is fairly low.
From purely engineering, manufacturing side, maybe, but you often have pay more than just the manufacturing cost. The companies have to pay for a good marketing team, customer service team, and after sales maintenance team for example. They might need the capital for certifications entering a new market too, for example. All of these cost money.
Grinder companies are still innovating too IMO. Burr design is an ongoing r&d in a lot of companies. Ionizer is another quite recent addition to combat retention.
Thousands in monthly production sold at close to cost might not be enough when considering ongoing expenses like salaries, r&d, etc.
You can do R&D, but you can make absolutely terrific grinders without it. Most of the "innovation" happening in this space seems to be more novelty than actual noticable performance/quality gains for the end user.