Kitchen & Housewares Black & Decker CBM205 Coffee Bean Mill, Stainless Steel
- pretty good for the priceThe bad reviews for this product are laughable. For under $30, what do you expect? I've had this grinder for 9 months and it works just fine. My biggest complaint is the mess it makes. I'm pretty sure it's impossible to get any coffee out of the basket and replace the lid without getting grounds all over your counter. But that's a minor annoyance. I'm actually surprised at how well this thing works for how cheap it was.
Rating:
- Noisy & Hard to useCome on Black & Decker, you can do better than this!? For as much noise that this thing makes, I'm surprised that the police haven't been at my door for disturbing the peace. They could have at least put an "on - off switch" on it that would stay on instead of having to hold it on for 5 minutes while this thing tries to grind coffee. If you want fine ground coffee, plan ahead, because you are going to be standing there holding the button on for some time. Make it a weekend project. I think that Black & Decker should have their design crew jailed on this one.
Rating:
- Do not buy this coffee grinder. Just don't do it.The only good thing I can say about this Black & Decker coffee grinder is the sense of morbid delight one can relish upon learning that all its many flaws are shared by others and exposed here in the Amazon customer reviews. But unless that is what you're buying a coffee grinder for -- in which case you've had WAY TOO MUCH coffee (or perhaps too little) -- it's really not worth it.
Let's review the problems with this product:
* On button must be held down. Moreover, the button is on the side, so unless you're trying to grind coffee while simultaneously thrusting the grinder off the counter, you'll have to hold onto it with your other hand. If you've got large enough hands, you may be able to hold the button down with your thumb while gripping the unit with your palm and fingers, earning a sense of accomplishment which I'm afraid to say is all too little consolation.
* Grinder gets clogged. Every couple weeks I have to take the thing apart and clear out all the coffee grit and dust. If this were the derailleur on my mountain bike, I wouldn't mind; I expect bike parts to get gritty often and need overhauling, plus there's a whole Zen thing going on there which just doesn't carry over to the desperate-for-coffee morning scene where the above scenario plays out.
* Grounds receptacle builds up static charge. This is an amazing thing. I had no idea coffee beans could so convincingly mimic the properties of magnetized iron filaments, as they cling together in a lump on the wall of the plastic container. I am forever scraping them off into the coffee filter. Sometimes they take to flight, perhaps attracted by the magnetic force of the International Space Station, only to settle scatter-shot all over the counter.
* Doesn't grind fine enough for espresso, or course enough for French press. The heavy grind itself isn't so very bad, but it's undercut the the fine powder of grounds that this machine invariably produces, and which causes so much trouble to the machinery and makes such a mess. Yet it doesn't grind quite fine enough for espresso, unless you're inclined to meticulously harvest all the aforementioned "fine powder" produced over the course of several days of grinding regular coffee.
* After a few months, works only intermittently. I've had this thing for several months, and just this past week it decided to quit working from time to time. The thing is a real stickler about having the receptacle seated just right and the lid closed. To get it to run, I have to scrape all the detritus off the base and click it in and out of position a few times, until finally it will chew up some beans for me.
With all these problems, you might ask why I'm still using this thing. I ask myself the same question every morning. Fact is, once I've got my coffee in hand, I forget all about it and carry on with my day. In fact, I've been meaning to write this review for months. For some reason I happened to think about it today while visiting Amazon for something else.
One of these days, I will remember to look for another coffee grinder when I'm at the store. It may take months, but when that happens, with God as my witness, I promise you the sledgehammer is coming out.
Please spare yourself all this anguish. It really is a very poorly designed machine -- so poorly designed, in fact, that I've sworn off ever buying anything by Black & Decker again. If they can screw up something as simple as a coffee grinder this badly, they can't be trusted to do anything right.
Rating:
- I give it a zero stars/ one star is too generous. Life is too short to own a gadget that causes so much aggravation (especially when you're uncaffeinated) and have to work so hard to make the beans grind properly.
The directions never say what that release valve is for in the well where you put the whole beans! What is that for?
As others have said it grinds too coarse (with whole pieces left in the grinds) or to a disgusting dust that flies away all over the kitchen when you open it.
All I wanted was a nice med-fine grind for a cup of drip coffee and this mill will not provide it for you.
Rating:
- design is flawedThis mill is seriously flawed because it jams up from all the dust it makes. After a month or so it clogged with coffee dust and the motor seized. I removed the twistoff cleaning plug from the loading funnel and tried to clean the chamber. I got some of it out but it is impossible to get most of it that way, and after a couple more runs it jammed again. The mill is defective by design as there is no way to disassemble it for cleaning. Save your thirty bucks!