Niche Zero Coffee Grinder. Kev’s 2024 UK Review

If you want to do that, be my guest ;-), but I can tell you from experience that while the Niche is a great grinder to use, it is sensitive when it comes to dialing in. Mess with the grind and you’ll be dialing in again – and dialing in is a pain when you’re gagging a great espresso.

See me using the Niche to grind alongside the Gaggia Ruby:

You may think “oh it’s currently at 11, I’ll just put it back to 11 after” – but as you’ll find out when you try that, it’s not quite as simple as that, unfortunately, if you grind much more coarse and then put it back where it was, you’ll have a bit of dialing in to do.

One of the great things about the smart grinder pro, in my opinion, is how fast and simple it is to make big changes in grind adjustments for manual brewing – and also for when I want to grind larger amounts.

For example, if I’m grinding over 100g of coffee for a big 1.8L pot in the Sage Precision Brewer, I can do that in one go with the Smart Grinder Pro, whereas with the Niche I’d need to do it in two stages due to the lack of hopper.

For more information on the Sage Precision Brewer, please see this post:

The Sage Precision Brewer Review

Best Filter Coffee Machines

Another thing I like about this grinder is the fact that it will also do an OK job for espresso. It’ll get fine enough for espresso with practically any espresso machine, it’ll do the job – the espresso you’ll get with it (depending on your machine) has the potential to be a lot better with the Zero of course, but if you need a back up grinder, it’ll do the job.

Regarding the “OK  job” comment – it depends on the machine.

I’m going to make the assumption that a lot of people (not everyone, granted) buying the Niche Zero is pairing it with either a higher end single boiler such as the ECM Casa V, or Classika PID, a heat exchanger machine like the Nuova Simonelli Oscar II or ECM Mechanika V1 Slim, or a dual boiler such as the Sage Dual Boiler, ECM Synchronika PID or La Marzocco Linea Mini.

the sage dual boiler reviewla marzocco linea mini review

If you’re pairing with a more entry-level machine like the Sage Bambino Plus for example, realistically speaking you’re not going to be able to taste the result of the extra investment in the grinder in the cup.

the bambino plus review

But pair an entry-level grinder such as the Smart Grinder Pro with a higher-end machine vs a much more premium grinder such as the Niche Zero, and I would suspect quite a difference in the cup – but, as I said, it’d still do the job as a backup even with an espresso machine at this kind of level.

The single doser and bellows thing, by the way – you probably don’t need the single doser, it’s a small unit anyway, and you can single dose in the relatively small hopper – but the smart grinder pro does retain a few grams, so the bellows & therefore the much lower retention would be a handy thing to have with this grinder.

And it’s only a couple of hundred quid, so it’s not a huge expense as an interim and eventually back up grinder – plus, as these are often hard to get, if you decide to just sell it rather than keep it as a back up once you have your Niche Zero, you’ll probably not lose much on it.

The single doser mods you can get for these grinders, by the way, are simple, they just give you some space to put the beans in, without requiring the hopper. 

The bellows are what add the “zero retention” bit.

It’s not quite the same as the zero retention on the niche as you don’t have to put in any effort to achieve that with the Niche Zero, it’s just the way it’s designed. With the bellows, you have to pump them a few times at the end of the grind to push out all of the grinds. 

Sorry, I digress, back to the post 🙂

Eureka Mignon Specialita

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Single doser

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Eureka Mignon Review

Again, I’m not saying this grinder is as good as the Niche Zero or that it’s an alternative – but having used the Eureka Mignon specialita, I do believe it’ll do a very good job in the meantime.

It’ll certainly fair better with some of the higher end espresso machines than the cheaper smart grinder pro would, and many people do pair this grinder with a heat exchanger and dual boiler machines.

It’s a compact yet very capable grinder, with a 55 mm flat burr, LCD screen, and stepless adjustment.

I think this is a fairly good pairing for quite a wide range of home barista or “prosumer” espresso machines, and although it’s quite a bit more expensive than the smart grinder pro, it’s still a fairly inexpensive grinder – and again, it’ll hold it’s value pretty well used.

The single doser element of this mod is simply a 3d printed piece which fits on top of the grinder and holds more than enough for single dosing. The low retention part is a set of silicone bellows, which pushes the ground coffee through and dramatically reduces the retention. 

Unlike single dosing and zero retention mods on some grinders, this one is very straight forward with no DIY involved other than taking the stuff out of the box and putting it on the grinder.

The other good thing is that it doesn’t require any adjustment to the grinder, so you’re not going to do anything that might invalidate the warranty. You’re just removing the hopper and putting the single doser unit on in its place. 

You don’t necessarily need to use the bellow if you prefer not to, the retention on the specialita is only about 1.5 grams, so it’s not huge – you could just purge a couple of grams, but personally, I’d prefer not to waste any coffee, and using bellows should bring the retention down enough for purging not to be required.

Baratza Sette 270

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Single Doser 

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Another very popular espresso grinder, the Sette 270 has been around for quite a while and features 40mm conical steel burrs, and a combination of stepped and stepless adjustment, larger steps for changing from manual brew methods to espresso, but then stepless adjustment within the espresso grinding range.

You can usually get hold of them for a similar price to the Mignon Specialita, just shy of £400, so with the single doser you’ll still have a bit of change from the £500 you’d be paying for the Niche Zero.

Again, I’m not suggesting the Sette 270 is as good as the Niche Zero or is an alternative, but this and the Specialita, above, are both very popular pairings with a wide range of single boiler, heat exchanger, and dual boiler espresso machines, and I think they’re another good option as an interim grinder while you wait for your Zero.

Yes, there have been a few issues with Baratza grinders – mainly with the gears, but Baratza support are known for being great, and it’s usually been a case of the customer being sent the replacement gears, so I don’t see this as a major red flag for Baratza grinders, as I know loads of people use them they’re generally very highly rated grinders for the cash.

Anyway, with that said – on with the review.

Going back to when I first heard of the Niche Zero. 

I try to keep an eye on coffee related crowdfunding campaigns, and I did see the IndieGoGo campaign for the Niche Zero grinder, but for some reason when I first saw it I didn’t give it a great deal of attention. I didn’t quite get from the initial campaign just what this grinder was, I didn’t get this until I had one sitting in front of me. 

Anyway, a bit later on it started to create a bit of a buzz, and I started to wonder what I’d missed about this grinder, so I got in touch to see if I could get hold of one for a week or two to try it out and to create this review. They sent me one and very kindly allowed me to give it away, so this Niche Zero was won by a lucky reader, along with a 6-month coffee subscription from Blue Coffee Box.

The Niche Zero Grinder – What is it?

As I said, I didn’t quite appreciate what the Zero was when I first heard about it – it wasn’t until I’d unboxed it and used it for the first time that I really got it. 

In a nutshell, the Niche Zero is:

• A commercial grade grinder, in terms of the build quality, and the quality of the components used.
• Far more at home in a kitchen than in a Cafe. Small, stylish – and really doesn’t look like a coffee grinder. 
• Quiet.
• A single dose grinder. 
• A grinder with almost zero grind retention, and importantly, even closer to zero exchanged retention.

So, what I conclude from the first three points above, is that:

The Niche Zero is the first true “prosumer” coffee grinder.

If you weren’t familiar with the term “Prosumer”, it’s a word often used to describe professional or commercial grade equipment designed for consumer use. I know it’s a bit of a contentious term, it does sound a bit pretentious, but it’s just a term used to describe higher grade equipment designed for home use. 

“Pro” = professional, “sumer”=consumer.

There are plenty of prosumer espresso machines, commercial-grade espresso machines which are made with domestic use in mind.

There are also a few coffee grinders that tick one of the prosumer boxes, that being that they’re aesthetically designed for home use – but these are budget coffee grinders, which aren’t anything near commercial grade grinders, so they’re not prosumer grinders.

best budget burr grinders review

All other coffee grinders I’m aware of are either designed as domestic, consumer coffee grinders – or they’re designed as commercial grinders.

If we look at the grinders that have obviously been designed for the consumer market, such as De’Longhi KG79 & Krups Expert. They’re more compact, and they’re clearly designed aesthetically for home use.

But these grinders have been manufactured for a fraction of the cost of commercial grinders. They’re not in the same league when it comes to performance. It’s unfair to expect to get anywhere close to the same quality in the cup from a £40/50 grinder as with a grinder costing ten to forty times this figure or more.

At the other end of the range, if you look at the most popular high end grinders, made by Mazzer, Eureka, Nuova Simonelli, Mahlkonig, Rocket, ECM, Macap & so on, most would look more at home in a cafe than a kitchen. They look like (and in some cases, are) commercial grinders. OK, some are smaller than commercial grinders, but they’re clearly coffee grinders, and their design is based on commercial grinders. 

A prosumer coffee grinder would be one that had the abilities and the build quality of the more capable commercial grade machines, but was made with domestic use in mind – and this is exactly what the Niche Zero is.

The Niche Zero uses hardened steel 63mm conical Mazzer Kony burrs – these aren’t cheap burrs, the Mazzer Kony is a commercial coffee grinder.

The body is powder coated aluminimum, and it’s powered by a high quality permanent magnet DC motor, which is geared down to grind at a speed much slower than the speed of the motor, in order to keep the noise down, and to increase grind power, as gearing down the motor produces torque. 

Reducing the speed of the burrs, by the way, also reduces static, and increases the overall grind quality. 

The Sage smart grinder pro is the closest I have previously experienced to a prosumer coffee grinder in terms of looks and user friendliness.

I think Sage (Breville, everywhere outside of Europe) did a great job of designing the smart grinder pro for domestic use. It’s compact, it very aesthetically pleasing, and it’s very simple to use. 

But it’s not quite prosumer, because it’s not quite in the same league as the commercial grade grinders, it can’t be at this price point. 

If Sage wanted to make a true prosumer machine, they would need to make more expensive choices when it comes to the motor, the burr set & the other components.

If they did this, they would end up with a grinder priced at £500+, which obviously isn’t the market they were aiming at with the  

I have to say, though – I’d love to see a “platinum” (or something…) version of the Smart grinder pro which coupled the same styling with more premium innards. But I digress.

The point I’m making a real pig’s ear of making ;-), is that as far as I’m aware, the Niche Zero is the world’s first true prosumer coffee grinder, it ticks all of the boxes.

It’s fairly small compared to commercial grinders, it’s certainly shorter than most, thanks partially to the fact it has no hopper. At 31.1cm tall it’ll fit under any kitchen cupboards unless you live in a doll’s house ;-). The other dimensions are 21.1cm x 12.2cm, so it is a compact grinder. It’s stylish, pretty, and quiet – but at the same time, it is made using high end components, and it’s capable of very high end performance. 

Quiet

This is a quiet grinder, but you don’t need to take my word for it, listen to the machine grinding coffee in my video below.

The Niche Zero uses a quiet DC motor, so the noise level from the motor itself is relatively quiet, as you can hear in the video above with I turn the grinder on without beans in.

But the other reason it’s such a quiet grinder is the gear system, which slows down the speed that the burrs spin. While this improves the grinding quality and creates torque giving the grinder loads of power to grind coffee beans, it also makes for quieter grinding.

Grinding Speed

The Niche Zero has been designed specifically as a single dose grinder for use at home, so it makes sense that they’ve focused on other areas, namely grind quality and noise reduction, over grind speed.

If you’re using a grinder in a busy cafe, then a few seconds difference per basket makes a big difference over the course of a day, but most people using a grinder at home would be more interested in how quiet a grinder is, and the grind quality, than they would be in grinding speed. 

That being said, I think the Niche Zero grinds at a respectable speed – I don’t think 13 – 15 seconds or so is particularly slow for 18g at espresso grind. The grinding speed with any grinder will depend on how coarse or fine you’re grinding, but when grinding for espresso I usually find that the Niche Zero grinds at around 1.1-.1.4 grams per second, and from around 1.5 – 2g per second for courser grinding. 

A True Single Dose Coffee Grinder

The next thing to mention that makes the Niche Zero special is that it’s designed as a true single dose grinder. 

If you’re not familiar with single dosing, it simply means weighing your beans and then grinding just what you need, rather than filling a hopper with coffee beans and then weighing the ground beans once in your portafilter. 

While the hopper is replaced by a simple lid over the burrs, instead of the portafilter cradle & a push start button (meaning that you push the button with the portafilter to start & stop the grind) you have a dosing cup, which fits into 58mm portafilters, or which can be dosed into smaller portafilters with the use of a funnel.

While the lack of a hopper reduces the height of the grinder and helps to define its stylish & unique looks, this wasn’t just a case of ditching the hopper to make it look the part. Martin Nicholson knew exactly what he was designing with this grinder, he wasn’t just designing a coffee grinder, he was designing a single dose coffee grinder, so it simply didn’t need a hopper. 

Instead of creating a grinder with a hopper and letting people decide whether they want to use it as a single dose grinder or not, I think he made quite a bold move in creating a hopperless grinder that was purely for people who were wanting to single dose, and I think this probably comes down to his experience as a product designer & developer.

It’s clear that this is a single dose coffee grinder, and it’s for people who want a single dose coffee grinder. If you want to use a traditional coffee grinder with a hopper and a portafilter cradle, then there are plenty to choose from, but when it comes to dedicated single doser grinders, this was really a gap in the market, especially at this kind of price point. 

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Almost Zero Grind Retention

Now we get to the most obvious feature of the Niche Zero, obvious because this is where it gets the name from. 

Grind retention refers to the coffee that stays within the grinder, but it’s not quite as simple as that. I think the best explanation of grind retention comes from coffee grinder and espresso machine expert Dave Corbey, as he describes in his very technical niche zero review. 

What Dave points out is that there are three main areas when it comes to retention. 

• Total retention – which is ALL the coffee that is retained within the grinder.
• Exchange – which is the ground coffee that is retained within the grinder which comes out in your portafilter the next time you grind. 
• Dose consistency – which means the weight of the ground coffee out vs the weight of the whole coffee beans in.  

What many people think is that the grind retention is the difference between the beans they load and the ground coffee that they end up within their portafilter, but this isn’t the case. This is the dose consistency, which is different from the total retention, and from the exchanged retention. 

For me, the most important figure in the above is the exchanged retention. In other words, with any particular grinder, how many grams of coffee is ending up in your portafilter, from the last time you ground coffee with it? This is important because this figure is how much coffee you’re going to need to waste. 

You don’t want coffee from the last time you ground ending up in your portafilter, if the last time you ground was at a different grind size while dialing in – or if the last time you ground was yesterday, or several hours ago. 

This means that you’d usually need to purge coffee through your grinder each time you use the grinder for the first time in a while, such as the first shot of the day, but more importantly, every time you change the grind size when dialing in. What this means is wasted coffee, and that’s bad – especially when it’s lovely, freshly roasted expensive speciality coffee.

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With other commercial grade grinders, the total retention can be 20g or more, the dose consistency can be plus or minus around 1g, and the exchanged retention can be 15g or more. This is why SCAE barista trainers, training baristas using expensive high end grinders teach new baristas to purge and dump a full 18 basket each time the grind size is adjusted when dialing in. I did my training using a Mythos one, which is a big high end commercial grinder, and this is how I was trained.

Dave Corbey did some testing with the Niche Zero, and as you can see in the video below, the results he got were amazing. 

The total retention with the Niche Zero, he found to be from 0.4g – 0.7g, the dose consistency he stated as plus or minus 0.2g but stated that it was usually much less, and the exchanged retention he figured out to be a maximum of 0.3g. 

The figure I’m really interested in there is the exchanged retention. What this means is that in an 18g basket, the maximum exchange you’re going to get from the last time you ground, is going to be under 1.7% – and what this means is that you really don’t need to worry about purging coffee – and what this means, is no more wasting coffee, and that is good! 

Grinding Speed 

The grinding speed with any grinder will depend on how coarse or fine you’re grinding, but when grinding for espresso I usually find that the Niche Zero grinds at around 1.1-.1.4 grams per second, and from around 1.5 – 2g per second for courser grinding. 

It grinds at between 1-2 grams per second according to the specs. From my timing, I’ve clocked it at 1.4g per second on average, including the popcorning time (more on this shortly). So 18g of coffee ground in 13 seconds, which would be more like 11 seconds without the popcorning.

This will change depending on the coffee being ground, and how finely you’re grinding it, I did these timings using a medium roast bean for Espresso at setting 17.

The grind adjustment is stepless, for perfect & easy dialing in – and it’s calibrated (and very simple to re-calibrate).

When it comes to espresso, the grind range is fantastic and very simple to use. I’d say the same is true for Aeropress, and for single cup pour over.

If you’re grinding mainly for filter, or for cafetiere, the Zero is certainly capable of much more coarse grinding, as of course as you like actually, but you may be going beyond the settings. That is, the settings finish at 50, so if you want to get to a more coarse grind for a large volume filter, or for cafetiere, you’ll be going beyond the numbered settings.

Differences Between Cafetiere and Filter Coffee

Some people have resolved this by adding their own second row of numbers on the dial. If you’re mainly grinding for Espresso, though, you’ll find the 1-50 range more than enough. All the beans I’ve ground with the Zero I dialed in at somewhere between 15-20.

It’s incredibly simple to use this grinder, it literally has an on & off switch, and that’s it. You weigh your beans, pour them in, close the lid, and flip on the switch. That’s that.

Popcorning – Updated. 

When I first published this Niche Zero review, I mentioned that the only slight potential negative with this grinder is popcorning. This is something that happens when single dosing, because you don’t have the weight of coffee beans sitting in the hopper pushing beans into the grinder, the last few beans can shoot around the hopper looking like popcorn popping, hence the term popcorning.

But this is no longer an issue – thanks to another clever invention from the Niche guys, something called the NFC disk, which stands for “No F#%king corning”. Niche says it stands for Niche Flow Control, but they can’t fool me! 😉 If you watch the clip below you’ll see this disk & how it works. 

Basically, it covers the burrs but obviously has a hole to let the beans drop through, so that once they’re above the burrs the plastic disk stops them from popcorning. 

Other Niche Zero Reviews. 

While I’m just Kev, there are some real coffee legends out there who’ve tried and loved, the Niche Zero.

One of these is the 2007 world Barista champion, co-founder of Square Mile coffee roasters, and author of the world coffee atlas, James Hoffman. James is not someone who will hold back the punches when he’s reviewing coffee gear, if he doesn’t like something you’ll know it.

So when he gets a grinder to review, (someone who I would imagine has plenty of commercial grinders available to him) and he decides to buy one for himself, that really says something about this grinder.

Another coffee legend who I’ve mentioned already, Dave Corbey, or “DaveC” on the UK coffee forums, has written this incredibly detailed and technical review of the Niche Zero, which I’d highly recommend if you like in depth technical reviews, which you’re unlikely to get from me! 😉

Perfect Daily Grind wrote a brilliant review of the Zero, in which they stated that this grinder: ‘ will absolutely blow away any grinder up to £800 and totally match any grinder of £1200.’

Chris Rendle, from Edgcumbes Coffee Roasters gave this glowing review, commenting that “it’s the easiest
grinder to dial in!” and concluding with ” Every café should have one.”

Conclusion, what I think about the Niche Zero.

I really, really like the Niche Zero. It’s such a great grinder to use, it’s the easiest grinder I’ve ever used in terms of dialing in, it’s just really enjoyable to use, and not having to purge coffee when dialing in is a really big thing for me, as I really dislike wasting coffee beans.

It looks great, it’s solid and feels like a machine that’s going to last a long time. There are no LCD screens, no fiddly components, just a motor & a simple on-off switch, so there’s very little on this grinder that strikes me as being likely to go wrong.

It’s quiet, the grind range is great (watch my YouTube video for close ups of the grind size at both ends of the range), capable of very fine espresso grind all the way up to cafetiere, and when it comes to single dosing, I don’t know of any other grinders at anything like this price which are designed specifically for single dosing. 

So, all things considered, having used the Niche Zero for a week or so when I first published this review and having used it more recently for the past few weeks prior to creating my YouTube review, the Niche Zero is a grinder I would wholeheartedly recommend.