Capresso 591.05 Review

The Capresso 591.05 is a serviceable coffee grinder, but it fails to offer the best value in its price range.

Performance Comparison

The Capresso 591.05 was towards the bottom of our overall scoreboard. While it wasn't bad by any standard, it also failed to impress us in any aspect.

Taste

The Capresso 591.05 earned a 5 out of 10 in our taste testing, which put it right around average overall, but far behind most of our recommendations.

We think the Capresso 591.05 meets the minimum requirement for being a worthwhile upgrade over pre-ground coffee. We did find coffee made from beans freshly ground with the 591.05 to be a bit more lively and flavorful than coffee made from comparable pre-ground beans. However, it is clear that the 591.05 struggles with grind consistency, as we noticed a significant amount of over-ground, very fine coffee dust, no matter what grind size setting we selected. This fines dust lead to overly bitter notes coming through when brewing with a french press. For pour over it forced the water to sit in the grinds for longer, again leading to somewhat of an over-extracted and bitter taste.

To totally fix these grind inconsistency issues you'll unfortunately have to spend at least $100 on a machine like the OXO Conical Burr, which produces an impressively consistent grind. However, you still can get a significant improvement in the same price range with the KitchenAid Blade. It also has inconsistency issues, but to a lesser degree than the 591.05, resulting in a less bitter taste and a better overall extraction.

Ease of Use

The 591.05 is relatively easy to operate, but it lacks some of the user friendly touches of many of the top models.

The 591.05 offers all of the convenience of a burr grinder, with the grinds being deposited in a separate bin from the whole beans. We find this preferable to blade models where you put the beans in a chamber, chop all of them up together, and then dump the whole thing into your coffee maker. In fact, this is the one aspect in which we prefer the 591.05 over the KitchenAid Blade.

However, the 591.05 also falls victim to most of the potential downfalls of burr grinders as well. Namely, it makes a lot of dust that can gunk up the burr, which necessitates some extra cleaning. We also found it a bit difficult to remove the burr to do said cleaning, making it a chore you may dread. The controls for both grind size and grind time also feel a bit flimsy. We found ourselves treating those controls with kid gloves because we doubted their durability.

Mess-Free Operation

This is where we really found the 591.05 annoying. Thus it earned one of the lower scores in this metric.

This low score is almost solely due to the 591.05's static electricity problem. We found that the machine creates a lot of static build-up, causing all of that fine coffee dust it produces, along with many of the larger grinds you actually want to put in your coffee maker, to stick to the grounds bin. The square bin doesn't help either, as the corners effectively become coffee ground super magnets. Getting the coffee out of the bin and into your coffee maker thus requires a lot of smacking on the bottom of the bin or trying to scoop it out with a spoon. This inevitably gets a bunch of grounds on your counter, and often elsewhere.

This is one area where the KitchenAid Blade is far superior. It produces very little static electricity, and generally allows you to neatly pour the grounds from the grinder and into your coffee maker with no hassle.

Noise

Here again the 591.05 was average in our testing. It is loud enough to wake light sleepers in the next room, but makes an amicable enough noise that you won't be covering your ears every time you use it. The competing KitchenAid Blade is slightly quieter, but would also probably wake up the light sleepers.

Value

At $50 the Capresso 591.05 is relatively inexpensive, especially for a burr grinder. However, the $50 KitchenAid Blade outperforms it in every metric, making it a farily poor value overall.

Conclusion