Tag: burr grinder

Fellow Ode Brew Grinder Review

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Fellow is known for making great looking and functional coffee products, their Stagg kettle is extremely popular. The Fellow Ode was a highly anticipated grinder because it offers large 64mm flat burrs, when most home appliance coffee grinders use conical burrs typically around 40mm in size. Flat burrs are usually found on larger prosumer and commercial grinders and are generally thought to offer a more consistent grind. Also the Ode is designed for single dosing, of which I am a huge fan. Single dosing means you measure your coffee by weight before each brew, so the Ode doesn’t have a traditional bean hopper that can store a lot of coffee, but has a small one that can only hold about 80 grams of coffee since you aren’t storing coffee in there. 

November 2022 Update: You can now purchase the Fellow Ode Gen 2 and Fellow Ode Gen 2 with SSP Burrs directly from Fellow. Along with the new and improved burr for finer grinding, it also has a larger capacity hopper and less static.

Let’s see how the Ode compares to the last two grinders (click here for full review) that we tested. I ran this test using 30 grams of light roasted coffee:

Fellow Ode:

  • Grind Time: 8.87 seconds
  • Grind Retention: .5 grams
  • Decibels: 79

Baratza Encore:

  • Grind Time: 19.49 seconds
  • Grind Retention: .5 grams
  • Decibels: 80

Oxo Conical Burr:

  • Grind Time: 9.16 seconds
  • Grind Retention: 1.6 grams
  • Decibels: 84

The Ode feels very solid and sturdy, it has a lower profile design than the other two. It also offers an automatic shut off feature that detects when there is no more coffee in the grinder. I think my unit may have been defective in that the power button kept getting stuck and the unit also made a quiet buzzing noise with vibration even when it wasn’t in operation, this appears to be a known issue with Fellow, one which there is no fix at this time. The position seems to be, don’t worry about it.. It isn’t the way it was designed, but it won’t waste power and won’t affect performance. Not sure I am really ok with accepting that as an answer. This is the first version of this grinder so I hope they address some of these issues in future releases, they plan to release a new grounds last this year that will be compatible with this version. Update: These issues were addressed in units manufactured starting in Q1 2021. You can check the Quarter and Year of manufacture on the bottom of the machine.

The Ode generates a fair amount of static, of the three grinders it had the most static. This could be addressed by using the Ross Droplet Technique (RDT), where you wet the handle end of a spoon and stir the beans before grinding or using a small spray bottle and lightly mist the beans before grinding. Don’t overdo it though and use too much water, you don’t want to drench the beans and get your grinder burrs wet. 

The Ode has a very premium look and feel, but also comes in at a premium price point. The results of the Ode are great as well, in blind taste tests it produced great coffee like the Oxo or Encore, but the Ode produced just a little bit more clarity from the cup. However, for me, I could only detect this in blind testing, when I was switching between the different grinders between brews the resulting cups all tasted similar with no one standing out as better or worse.

You can totally geek out on coffee grinders and spend a lot of money. Due to the pretty common size of the flat burr grinder you can upgrade the burrs for better performance. Fellow sells the upgraded SSP burrs as well as the Gen 2 brew burrs on their website which will give you better results. This will allow you to grind a lot finer as well. I did find the range of grind size on the Ode to fall firmly within the brew grind range, which is exactly as it is advertised, so this isn’t a negative, but just know that the range of the grind size on the other two machines is much wider, however none of these grinders will provide good results for use with espresso.

Compared to the other grinders, the Ode will require tools if you need to clean it or calibrate it. Just a phillips screwdriver for most things, but cleaning does require a little more legwork than with the Oxo or Encore. This isn’t uncommon for flat burr grinders though, and there is the option to use grinder tablets to clean as well, but you won’t get it as clean as you would with disassembly.

If you like the design of the Fellow Ode and only plan to use it for brew grinding, I would definitely consider this as your home brewer. I really like the form factor, function and how small the unit is compared to traditional burr grinders with larger hoppers. I think with the following and support of this grinder, there will be more cool options and upgrades coming down the pipeline. While there have been some issues with these grinders, like the issues I had on the unit, they are known for having great customer support and should help you with resolving any issues you have.

You can access the manual for the Ode here.

Must Have Items To Up Your Coffee Game

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Two things you must have if you want to up your coffee game:

Weight vs. Volume

Some of you who have done cooking or looked up a famous chef or baker’s recipe knows that many of them don’t use volumetric measurements. Pretty much any baker or cook outside of the U.S. can instantly recognize an American recipe because it uses volume measurements like teaspoons, tablespoons, cups, pints or quarts.

If you want to make your life easier with coffee, use the metric system. Grams of coffee to milliliters of water (this is where the kitchen scale comes in). A milliliter of water weighs exactly 1 gram so it makes this incredibly easy. Most roasters recommend a ratio from between 1:15 to 1:17 for drip and pour over coffee.

Here is a quick cheat sheet for grams of coffee to milliliters of water following the widely recommended ratio of 30 grams per 500 ml or water or 60 grams per 1 liter of water. Another way is to divide milliliters of water by 16.7 for grams of coffee needed, or say I’m at the end of a bag of coffee and only have 37 grams left, multiply by 16.7 and I know to use 618 ml of water for my brew.

Here it is in cups and fluid ounces, with rounding for convenience. Useful if your coffee brewer only lists cups. *This is based off US cups of 8 fluid ounces. Cups can mean 4, 5, 6, or 8 ounces of water depending on your brewer, try to figure out how many fluid ounces you are using vs. cups to avoid the wrong ratio.

If your coffee recipe involves number of scoops per cups of water, consider switching to a weight based recipe. Coffee beans come in all different sizes and water content and using a volume measure like a scoop is not at all precise.

Check out our post about kitchen scales.

Burr Grinder

The single most important thing to adjust the taste of your coffee is the size of the grind. It is recommended that you don’t alter anything else about your coffee recipe other than the grind size to adjust the taste. So if your coffee is too bitter, the solution isn’t to add more water to dilute it, the answer is to adjust your grind coarser. If your coffee is weak or sour you need to adjust the grind finer. The only way you can get a consistent and even grind, is to use a burr grinder.

A blade grinder works like a food processor or blender and just chops your coffee beans into inconsistent chunks of coffee. Invest in a burr grinder, this will cost anywhere from $80-140 for a decent electric grinder.

For each type of coffee you get, ideally you should adjust your grind finer and finer until you taste that bitterness you don’t like, the adjust it coarser just a little to know you are getting the ideal extraction level.

Check out our grinder recommendations here and our review of two of the most popular entry level grinders here.