I have lurked for a long time on these forums and have been guided in my espresso adventures in learning from the valuable information posted by the many knowledgeable members here, and have just joined today as a member.

I have been contemplating buying a flat burr grinder to complement my compak K10 Professional Barista that I have been using for the past decade and I have always loved using it. Lately though I have been wanting to try lighter roasts and wanting to taste those raspberry or mango accents etc ! The roasts I have here using tend to be medium or darker and the shots are thick and heavy bodied and having lots of blended flavour but I have always had difficulty in distinguishing individual flavour notes.

I would love to try the dedicated boutique flat burr single dosing grinders having burrs 80mm or larger like the Weber EG-1, Kafatek Monolith Flat or Max, the Levercraft Ultra and the Lagom P100 but their sticker price is really high. On top of that I live in Asia so for many of those brands, after sales support should anything break down would be difficult.

So I was wondering - for the purposes of single dosing, would a commercial hopper equipped on demand grinder like the Elektra Atom Speciality 75 or the fiorenzato e83 give just as good and fluffy grinds as those boutique big burr grinders but at half the price?

Of course i would expect that the workflow would be a good deal more busy using the former as one would have to get rid of the retention grinds every time one uses them by using puffers or bellows or vacuums etc and replacing the hopper with a solution that would compress the few beans into be grinder in the lack of a hopper. However if we are prepared to do that, would the results be just as good?

I'd suggest 64 mm SSP MP burrs in a Super Jolly or DF64 if you're looking to try out modern burr sets yourself, at a moderate cost.

Thanks Jeff for the recommendation. I am certainly looking at df64 and especially in combination with that new ssp lab sweet 64mm cast burr set as the cost of a dittings 807 is really high. Do you think the 83mm burr set in the fiorenzato or in the mazzer major would produce better results in the grind than those 64mm burrs?

Thanks Jonk for your very helpful reply.