Baratza Sette 30 Electric coffee grinder

Product Information

Design-wise, almost all the Sette grinders look the same, the famous 7-shape design. But there are some differences in the material and the way it works. On the side of most coffee grinders is a chute. However, the Sette’s “7” shape means that the grounds can fall straight from the burrs to the portafilter or grounds bin, preventing retention.

Operating the Baratza Sette 270 is incredibly straightforward. The LCD front panel might look a bit old school, but this makes it very intuitive, with no hidden menus or symbols to remember. The settings here control the grind time, with up and down arrows that let you adjust the timing to 1/100th of a second. Then it’s as simple as pressing the start button and letting the grinder do its thing.

Baratza Sette 30 AP Coffee Grinder

The display is the same in all Sette grinders, but the major changes are in the buttons; the Sette 30 has 4 buttons and the 270 has 7 buttons.

OXO Brew Grinder is slightly larger than the Sette 30, measuring 16. 4 inches in height, 11.1 inches in width, and 7.2 inches in depth. It has a built-in Acaia Scale, which automatically decides the instructed weight and it actually works pretty handsomely. The Sette 30 absolutely beats the Dose Control Pro in several areas. First, in timing; the Sette 30 has a digital 1/100th second timer (until 10 seconds, then goes to 1/10th second); the Dose Control Pro’s biggest flaw is it’s timer is in 1 second intervals. On grind quality, I definitely give the nod to the Sette 30; there’s less fines at espresso, and it’s super fluffy non compacted coffee delivery (the Dose Control Pro gets clumpy). In speed, there’s no question – the Sette 30 is easily 2x faster, if not more so. After all, it’s hard to find entry-level grinder espresso grindersthat don’t have some sort of compromise.Zero retention grinders are perfect for home use. In a cafe where you’re constantly grinding, any residue in the grinder is pushed through by the next batch of beans. If you’re only making coffee in the morning, you’ll end up with stale bits of coffee sitting in your grinder all day. Grind retention also means you waste coffee and can make it harder to dose correctly as your output won’t match your carefully measured input. Grind adjustment is also easy. There are clear marks on the macro and micro dials. So, you can easily replicate and swap from a fine espresso setting to a coarse one without detecting a difference in extraction. It’s simple and intuitive. Zero retention means that you don’t waste any grounds by purging through the previous bean every time you change coffee bean or grind setting. The Sette 270 has Baratza’s famous “Macro / Micro” adjustment range, one that works much better than the one found on their Vario and Forte models. This gives you a lot more adjustment ability when dialing in espresso. The issue, Baratza found out, was that their 270 burr geometry (which they also planned to use in the 30 model) as designed by Etzinger, had problems doing a full range of drip grinds up to press pot grinds. Even so, this burr set is amazing: it is absolutely blazing fast at espresso grinds (up to 4.5g a second) and the peak on grind size was tight when grinding for espresso. That meant not much fines, and not much coarse bits – most of the grind was within a set range of micron particle sizes.