Black & Decker CBM205 Coffee Bean Mill, Stainless Steel Review

The only good thing I can say about this Black & Decker coffee grinder is the sense of morbid delight one can relish upon learning that all its many flaws are shared by others and exposed here in the Amazon customer reviews. But unless that is what you're buying a coffee grinder for -- in which case you've had WAY TOO MUCH coffee (or perhaps too little) -- it's really not worth it.

Let's review the problems with this product:

* On button must be held down. Moreover, the button is on the side, so unless you're trying to grind coffee while simultaneously thrusting the grinder off the counter, you'll have to hold onto it with your other hand. If you've got large enough hands, you may be able to hold the button down with your thumb while gripping the unit with your palm and fingers, earning a sense of accomplishment which I'm afraid to say is all too little consolation.

* Grinder gets clogged. Every couple weeks I have to take the thing apart and clear out all the coffee grit and dust. If this were the derailleur on my mountain bike, I wouldn't mind; I expect bike parts to get gritty often and need overhauling, plus there's a whole Zen thing going on there which just doesn't carry over to the desperate-for-coffee morning scene where the above scenario plays out.

* Grounds receptacle builds up static charge. This is an amazing thing. I had no idea coffee beans could so convincingly mimic the properties of magnetized iron filaments, as they cling together in a lump on the wall of the plastic container. I am forever scraping them off into the coffee filter. Sometimes they take to flight, perhaps attracted by the magnetic force of the International Space Station, only to settle scatter-shot all over the counter.

* Doesn't grind fine enough for espresso, or course enough for French press. The heavy grind itself isn't so very bad, but it's undercut the the fine powder of grounds that this machine invariably produces, and which causes so much trouble to the machinery and makes such a mess. Yet it doesn't grind quite fine enough for espresso, unless you're inclined to meticulously harvest all the aforementioned "fine powder" produced over the course of several days of grinding regular coffee.

* After a few months, works only intermittently. I've had this thing for several months, and just this past week it decided to quit working from time to time. The thing is a real stickler about having the receptacle seated just right and the lid closed. To get it to run, I have to scrape all the detritus off the base and click it in and out of position a few times, until finally it will chew up some beans for me.

With all these problems, you might ask why I'm still using this thing. I ask myself the same question every morning. Fact is, once I've got my coffee in hand, I forget all about it and carry on with my day. In fact, I've been meaning to write this review for months. For some reason I happened to think about it today while visiting Amazon for something else.

One of these days, I will remember to look for another coffee grinder when I'm at the store. It may take months, but when that happens, with God as my witness, I promise you the sledgehammer is coming out.

Please spare yourself all this anguish. It really is a very poorly designed machine -- so poorly designed, in fact, that I've sworn off ever buying anything by Black & Decker again. If they can screw up something as simple as a coffee grinder this badly, they can't be trusted to do anything right.

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Product Description:
Savor the taste of a freshly ground bean brew from this precise milling system that crushes coffee beans within seconds.No more guesswork!Dial adjusts so you can set the texture exactly the way you want - from very fine Turkish blend to coarse percolator grind.Dual safety mechanism ensures that the unit will not operate unless the top cover is closed and the ground coffee receptacle is in place.

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