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Everyday Beans Podcast - Mostly About Coffee and Other Stuff
It's about coffee, food, life and what other randomness I feel that'll be helpful to the common coffee drinker or to anyone who likes to be entertained by a stranger, briefly.
Everyday Beans Podcast - Mostly About Coffee and Other Stuff
Why I Don't Recommend the Baratza Virtuoso
In this episode, I'm diving into coffee grinder recommendations—specifically why I don't recommend the Baratza Virtuoso despite owning it for years. I share my honest experience with this popular $250 grinder, explaining how it performs flawlessly mechanically and looks great on your counter, but ultimately falls short in what matters most: the cup quality. I talk about how the Virtuoso produces a muddy, concentrated flavor profile where all the tasting notes hit at once and then dissipate, making it difficult to distinguish the nuanced characteristics that make each coffee unique. I explain why this becomes more apparent as your palate develops and you start seeking clarity and separation in your cups.
I also provide practical alternatives that deliver better value and cup quality. I recommend starting with the Baratza Encore, which offers the same grinding capability as the Virtuoso but costs $70-100 less, making it a smarter entry point into quality grinding. For those ready to explore hand grinding, I discuss the Timemore K6 as an excellent option that provides noticeably better clarity and separation in the cup at around $80-100. By listening to this episode, you'll learn how to make smarter purchasing decisions that align with your coffee journey stage, understand why grinder profiles matter as much as grind settings, and discover when it's time to upgrade as your palate evolves.
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[00:00:00] Talking about gear again. This time we're talking about grinders. In this particular talk, we're talking about grinders that I recommend, grinders that I don't recommend. I'll tell you the reasons why, an alternative to whatever I say I don't recommend.
[00:00:25] In this case, we're talking about the Baratza Virtuoso. I had this grinder for many years. Really good grinder, no real complaints about it except for a couple. It worked flawlessly. It was easy to change parts.
[00:00:45] That's one thing about Baratza that's really cool is that you can buy individual parts of it. They have videos online, on YouTube, to show you how to change all that stuff. People even modify these particular gadgets. But other than that, it kind of starts to fall a little flat.
[00:01:13] What I mean by that, no pun intended because it's a conical burr, not a flat burr. That's really not so much the issue. It could be the issue because there is a difference in quality and clarity and what you get out of a cup of coffee. But let's continue on this path of the good things about it. Like I said, it's easy to change parts. It's easy to play around with different dials as you're trying to dial in your coffee.
[00:01:47] But like most grinders, this is not only relevant to the Baratza Virtuoso, most of the grind settings are crap. I would say between, I think it went up all the way to 40 clicks. I say between 26 all the way down to like 12 or 10. Those are the sweet spots. That's where you want to be even for French press believe it or not.
[00:02:19] And the other reason why I don't recommend this grinder is because it's expensive for what it is. It's $250. Yeah, probably sure you can get it on sale from time to time on Prime Day and on Black Friday and all that good stuff. But the thing about it is that it's $250 for what it can do for you. Like I said, if you are in this journey to just simply grind your coffee, it works great. It's a lot flashier, prettier than what I would recommend.
[00:02:58] The build quality of it is really good. That's the main reason why I got it. I mean, I brew coffee every day. I want something that looks nice. That's presentable and that just works. And the Baratza Virtuoso does that.
[00:03:20] Like I said, the parts are really easy to change. It's easy dialing your coffee. It has a couple of seconds to where you can actually making your cups of coffee. No matter what you do, you change the grind size here and there for that particular coffee.
[00:03:57] There's no degree of separation. There's no element of understanding what clarity truly really is. And the reason why I'm saying that is because after a while, you start to go down this rabbit hole of like, is this the best that this coffee will taste? For the very longest, I thought that it was either me, of course, the water chemistry. I thought it was something I wasn't doing right. There's other factors that I don't really want to get into right now. I just want to mainly talk about the grinder itself.
[00:04:37] But after a while all the coffee started to taste really the same. It had this nice concentrated type of burst of flavor in your mouth and then it will dissipate. That makes any sense. So the flavor was there. You can get everything all at once and then it just dies down from there, which is not a bad way to drink your cup of coffee or to experience coffee for that matter. But the thing about it is that it was very muddy.
[00:05:15] It was hard to decipher exactly what you were really tasting. And again, no matter what I tasted no matter what I went through, that's more so the situation that I was getting from this cup of coffee. This type of profile. And that's the thing about it. It's the profile that's more so the issue.
[00:05:41] You would think that grinders are agnostic. They just grind the coffee and after they grind the coffee. Which isn't bad if you want to sit them out. Sure. But at the end of the day, you're drinking that coffee for whatever it is. And to an extent, it may actually make you not like that coffee.
[00:06:27] Because sometimes when you see things on the bag telling you what it tastes like you may get elements of it. But in truth, at least for me, you'll get it all at once concentrated together in a muddy fashion. If that makes any sense whatsoever.
[00:06:48] So that's what you will probably experience down the road a couple of years down the road as you keep drinking your coffee because what's going to end up happening is that this is probably going to be one of your first big boy, big girl grinders that you pick up. And as you go throughout your journey, your palate starts to change. It gets more refined. You start to understand the things that you do like about particular coffee, different roast degrees, different origins, different things that you like on the after finish, things that you can kind of manipulate with different brewers and all that stuff. But then after a while you start to kind of isolate the variables and then you're going to get to the place of wait, something about this isn't right. Something about this doesn't seem to gel right with me just because of what I'm actually tasting in the cup.
[00:07:45] And it's the profile of the grinder. So that's really the biggest reasons why I don't recommend the Baratza Virtuoso. So what do I recommend and where we're going to come here and talk about to where I think this is very helpful and how this can actually help you in your coffee journey. So believe it or not, I didn't start with the Virtuoso. I actually started with the little brother as they would say, the step down version.
[00:08:26] The one that's not as mature as a Virtuoso is the Baratza Encore. The reason why is because it's essentially the same. It's just in a different skin and the price difference is significant. I think it, I believe it's about $70 to $100 less than the Virtuoso. The Virtuoso is nice. It looks nicer. The buttons a lot better. But the Baratza Encore is just as on par, same burrs, exact same settings.
[00:09:04] That's the grinder that I will highly recommend you start off with as entry level grinder. You're still going to get those exact same coffee grinder profile characteristics in the cup. So this is a cheaper alternative and then the cool thing about it is that as you continue to drink your coffee and explore coffee and get better at coffee and your palate starts to get refined, then you wouldn't feel too bad about going on to the next grinder for whatever that may be.
[00:09:50] If you want to go ahead and go into the whole hand grinder situation, the one I will recommend is this one. This is the K6. The K6 is a really cool grinder. The reason why is because you'll get some type of separation in the cup of coffee compared to the Baratza Encore. You'll get a little bit more fluffier grinds and I think the actual size of the burrs are really relatively similar to each other. It's really easy. You hear that very tactile understanding what you're doing. You can put 30 to 35 grams of coffee inside of here.
[00:10:32] And the cool thing about the K6 to me is that you can get the whole gamut. You can get it from espresso all the way to French press and I think that's pretty cool. And you'll get a little bit more separation, little bit more clarity and then your cups will be tasting a lot drastically different. And this one's about $80, $90, I think $100 for this particular grinder at the time that I'm actually filming this. And it works pretty good and it's significantly cheaper. And this is a good gateway for you to get into hand grinders.
[00:11:18] So like I said, the Baratza Virtuoso isn't a bad grinder. That price right there is kind of a little scary. But then after a while you start to realize that something is missing in this cup of coffee. They are all starting to taste the same. And once you get there, you're deep into the rabbit hole. And you're going to try to find something that gives you that type of clarity, that separation, that nuance in what you want to taste.
[00:12:00] I would recommend the K6, the ZP6, Zuppresso. But that's a story for another day. We'll talk about that another day. Right now we're just talking about decent alternatives to a $260 grinder that's extremely muddy in a cup. Once you start to realize, and when you realize that don't feel bad about the situation, don't feel bad about the actual grinder.
[00:12:36] Just know that you are on a path to understanding coffee even more so. And that your palate is changing. It's getting better. And you may be up to spending a lot of money in the future. But you don't have to do that right from the get go with a Baratza Virtuoso. So you spend on something else that's a little bit better in what you get in the flavor profile.
[00:13:07] So this is Everyday Beans talking about what I don't recommend, but in this place, what I do and the reasons why. Talk to you later. Bye.