Hi Everyone,

I haven't been to the grinder forum for a long time because my grinder has served my needs perfectly. I bought the K30 grinder for about $1,700 and back then I thought it was ridiculous to spend that much. I originally bought the Quickmill Vetrano Espresso machine which was already over my budget and the last thing I wanted to buy at the same time was a grinder. Unfortunately, I found out my $150 grinder simply wouldn't work with espresso (I tried!).

I did have the short hopper break once, but Mahlkonig sent me a free replacement. The have a US based support center and I'll encourage you to look for their YouTube videos where they show how they make their own burrs in house at their German facility.

Anyway, 8 years later I am not even remotely tempted to own anything else. I am hoping to keep it for another 20+ years...

It looks like the direct replacement is the E65 and I would recommend getting the short hopper if you have normal cabinets. I also see they have a new home model (X54). At the lower price point I can't imagine it is anyhwhere in the same league, but I do see they still make the burrs for it in Germany.

My grinder with the short hopper easily fits under the cabinet, but I do slide it out to refill the beans about once a week.

https://www.chriscoffee.com/products/ma ... so-grinder

https://www.mahlkoenig.us

Good luck, I know we all have different budgets and goals.

Yes it's a very nice grinder and works perfectly, especially in cafe settings. It grinds fast, consistent and is pretty quiet. I've owned one for 3 years but just couldn't live with the large amount of retention it had (over 8gr) so I sold it. That was the only downside for me because I didn't want to throw away half a shot of grinds every espresso I made.

K30 makes nice espresso but is highly inconsistent as far as extraction times, needing frequent adjusting compared to grinders like kafatek offerings.

I bought a new k30 in 2016 and used it for a couple of years before my first kafatek arrived, grind speed and taste were great on the k30.

Did you keep at least 200gr of beans in the hopper as these grinders are made for that? When you do that it should be pretty consistent from my experience. And in a cafe settings it's really consistent as should be expected.

Maybe retention gave you these inconsistent results as the stale coffee was more/less old dependng on the time between shots and thus creating resistance in the puck that was all over the place. Or did you try to singledose it as it's completely unusable for that?

The first couple days I had it I attempted to single dose not knowing you couldn't with disastrous results, even with the burrs chirping it couldn't grind fine enough for espresso, I thought it was broken until I started making sure at a minimum the throat was full of beans, but still found day to day you were always adjusting in the morning. It's possible that was due to stake grinds, I did always purge some, but maybe not enough?

In any case. I think the k30 is a great grinder and I never regretted the purchase nor disliked the grinder

If it was that inconsistent then you didn't purge enough or didn't have enough beans in the hopper. It's crazy consistent if you use it for what it's made for and that's a high output cafe setting.