Baratza Forte BG Flat Steel Burr Grinder

UPDATE – Part II: January 2020Well I could not leave well enough alone and I let Baratza leadership know about this review. Shortly thereafter Baratza support reached out to me and was more willing to help. Now they may have been more willing to help last time but their note to me was not at all clear if so. They basically told me: sorry for your frustration, ask the reseller if they will refund the unit (see below; they did not), Baratza will refund the repair charge (did that already since it was under warranty), try cleaning it, get new coffee. So that’s when I wrote this review and shared it.Fast forward to just after I notified them of this review and Baratza support reached out and offered to help. They offered to send me a new unit with a return label for the old one and see if things got better. My goal was to get back to what I had before: wake up, hit the button, take the dog out, come back to perfectly ground coffee, accurately weighed. Those first six months with this unit were just that. This new unit is all around better but not what I had before. First, it grinds much cleaner and much finer on the same settings as the last. Second, it does not generate the static the old unit did which required a daily cleanup. Third, I don’t need to stir the beans in the hopper as often to get them to drop into the grinding area but I do need to stay close to the unit and stir on occasion which is very different from the time before.So I have decided to improve the rating here and change the headline from “Baratza – Buyer Beware” to the one above. While I prodded them, they clearly cared enough to help so I gave them 2 more stars for that. I still feel like if you are like me and want dark, oily beans ground you may not be totally satisfied with this unit but it’s still so better than others I’ve tried.UPDATE: December 2019Well sadly my love for this grinder came to a halt in November 2019. The best way I can describe what has happened is if I owned an 8 cylinder Porsche and one day I took it to the shop for an alignment and it came back with 4 fewer working cylinders – yes it still runs but it ain’t a 100K Porsche anymore.In my case I had a great honeymoon with this grinder (see original 5 star review below). From the day I purchased it up to Oct 2019 it worked perfectly. I would start it up, let it grind to the proper weight of beans and take the dog out. Came back every time from Feb-Oct with perfectly ground beans, no static, and no mess. Then on that fateful day in October the unit came to a halt. It was like it was slowly running out of gas to keep the car analogy going.So handyman that I am (not) I look to YouTube, find a video of the nice Baratza technician (Pierce) who shows step-by-step how to clean this exact grinder which, to be totally honest, I did not do this one time since owning it. I never really thought about it and figured this is one of the perks of owning a grinder that cost more than my first car. Well I follow Pierce’s cleaning steps but get ahead of myself and miss a critical one – I turned it over after I removed the top burr which I now know is a no-no because it loosened something that could only be fixed by Baratza support. Bummer! I came to terms with this fact and shipped it back to Baratza repair (which darn expensive (~$70) since it’s big, heavy, and cost almost $1K).So I’m w/o grinder for a week and when it comes back and I truly excited to get back into my routine. Unfortunately my excitement was quickly tempered when the *very first grind* didn’t work. The grinder also sounded very different, wimpy in a way, like my 8 cylinder sports car came back with only 4 cylinders running. In an attempt to be helpful, I created videos of the problem (posted on YouTube but cannot link here) for Baratza support and I recall thinking to myself this is just a mixup – I got someone else’s grinder and they will fix this right away. No such luck. To grind the beans now I have to sit over the open hopper and move them all around to get the “bean damn” to break. When done grinding, they are static mess and every single day I need to clean up the area. Everything is the exact opposite of my first six months of ownership when I lovingly gave this thing an exuberant 5 star review!?I mentioned before that the grinder came back sounding weak/wimpy. Does this sound like maybe it’s somehow underpowered after repair? Does to me but I am not a coffee grinder expert and when I asked was told that the change in sound was from the “belt tension” during the repair.Baratza support was incredibly nice and responsive but they were clearly telling me this is my fault. What did I do wrong? Well it’s complicated but according to Baratza it’s my beans. Baratza support even helped me with my car analogy here by suggesting “but like getting gas from the gas station, you can keep getting the same gas at the same station and if you get bad gas the car can have running issues” – a reference to my coffee beans. The beans I order are from Cafe Mam a Fair Trade coffee purveyor based in Oregon who only buys Mexican organic, shade grown beans. They arrive at my house about 5 days after roasting and it is the best coffee I’ve ever had (tried Peets, Starbucks, Stumpdown, La Colombe, etc..). Just read about them and then tell me that they don’t know how to roast coffee beans? To say my “gas” i.e. my beans are bad is insulting. I know coffee beans and can tell you these are the finest beans I’ve ever seen, hands down. But now these beans, the only beans I’ve used since we found Cafe Mam in early 2018, are too dark, too oily, that the coffee purveyor is the problem. Mind you this unit is advertised as a “5 lb per day commercial” unit. More importantly, nowhere do they say that the unit not good for dark and/or oily beans on their website. To the contrary they have a review that states the unit “near bullet-proof”. I guess I have the silver bullet with my Cafe Mam beans and 200g of grinding a day.Baratza did not offer to do another repair, send another unit, or really do anything other than to tell me to go with different beans. Continuing down the tried and true deflection method of customer service, they said to call the reseller which was of no help though they were trying to be helpful, they just can’t do anything with this unit since it cannot be returned. I agree it’s not the reseller’s problem. It’s not my (not so) awesome credit card protection plan’s job either. My credit card company won’t help because it’s not broken-broken, only sort of broken. It’s a 4 cylinder Porsche and technically it still runs.At the end of the day, I counted on Baratza’s name and the reputation of this company and a “near bullet-poof” commercial grinder to meet my needs. They failed at that and they know it and they won’t do anything further to help me if I continue to use the beans from the purveyor that I love. I really thought Baratza was a different kind of company in regards to building and maintaining long term customers who write reviews like my original 5 star review of this unit. Too bad really.2 stars because I can still use it to make coffee but it’s only marginally better than a $30 throw away unit from a big box store.ORIGINAL 5 STAR REVIEW:I drink pour over coffee everyday and make around 200g of coffee for the family. I had a terrible experience with a much cheaper product and after that, decided to go all in and get something I thought would last and give me great results day in and day out. This is it. It’s super easy to brew pour over coffee now. The coffee grinds perfectly with no static and zero mess. I realize for the price this is the way it should be but I cannot recommend this grinder enough. Look at it like this. You can do like I did and buy a few $250 grinders over the years or just get the commercial quality one once. This thing is built like a tank and I think it will stand the test of time. It’s been my experience that Baratza stands behind their products should I ever have any issues with my crazy over the top grinder that I love.

Just for my home, but it is so handy to just push the button and within a few seconds you have the grounds all weighed out ready to make your coffee.

Really good, does what it’s supposed to. The scale is a little bit off every now and then (just fractions of a gram, but still!). With french press it leaves very few fines and the grind granularity is quite uniform.

Just an incredible burr grinder. Make sure to experiment with your beans and follow some good external sources to make sure you use it correctly – coffeegeek.com is a good place to start.