The Key

The Key is their electric conical grinder, and the HG-1 is their manual conical grinder.

Eureka XL, Eureka Libra, and Weber Key M1 are the 3 grinders on my bar now and it’s what I found on the secondary market for good deals. If you are patient you can find some killer deals. I won’t say how much I spent on each one but I’ll say that I usually don’t buy a grinder unless I can get it for 50~% off. This way if I decide down the line to sell it I can usually easily recoup my money and pass on the deal to someone else. I have had a bunch of other grinders on my bar over the last few years but they come and go depending on what I can find. I’ll likely swap out one of my Eureka grinders in the near future Iv seen a lot of grinder go up for sale in my area and the two Eureka grinders are to similar in taste. For now the XL serves as my daily, the Libra as my decaf, and the Key is mostly used when I try out some new beans. But I also really like to brew my daily beans with it but it requires more time and energy to deal with vs the 6-7 seconds from the XL.

I’ve just got the Weber key. It will be replacing my niche zero. It will also sit alongside my DF83 with mazzer 151 burs. I think I have all my bases covered 😊

So you are planning to go from conical to flat. Will give you a totally different cup. I love my niche. I also have df83 with mazzer 151 A burrs. I ended upgrading to a key mk2. I love the traditional espresso profile

After 400-700€ diminishing returns hit fast. But you WILL get a really good grinder for that amount. No need for a weber. If you want to buy a forever grinder, the Philos is endgame territory, capable of incredible Espresso and Filter coffee and there is plenty of shops in Germany who service Mazzer machines if it were to ever fail. Eureka are great by the way and they enjoy a good reputation, even in more nerdy areas of the internet. The Femobook series has garnered a good reputation lately but they have to yet prove longevity. The Lagom Casa also enjoys a really good reputation by now and their customer service is said to be really good. I heard they struggle with ultra light beans but that might have been V1.

At the price point here in Germany, there's a good argument for that, yes. But there's of course other machines like the EG-1, Wug2, Kafatek Monolith or Ozik TheAll if you want to really go crazy with grinders.

So if I would have to buy a grinder right now for under 1K, I would probably get the Lagom Casa. It's said to be very similar to my I200D Philos burrs with less retention and a much smaller footprint. Just a weaker motor. Or the Femobook A68. The Femobook seems super nice and really well engineered, if you can live with that ass ugly Femobook Logo on top. When I was shopping for the Philos, it was between it, the Casa and the Femobook A68. Decided for the Philos because I got it from a store at a discount.

For your use case the “upgrade” path is kafatek MC6 or Weber key as far as conical goes. I personally think the key is a downgrade (big one) from a workflow perspective. Haven’t used a MC6 but hear very nice things

Weber key mkii at low rpm is whisper quiet. Quieter than my hand grinder because I usually grind faster by hand than the key does at minimum speed