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April 1. A date many think of as April Fools day, and certainly ten years ago, many folks in the old CoffeeGeek forums felt some information about a brand new hand grinder might just be an April Fools prank. But it was not.
That was the day that Barb and Doug Garrott, of Orphan Espresso, posted the first ever public photos of the Pharos hand cranked coffee grinder, announcing it as a sort of “birth announcement”. It was (and is) a beast of a grinder. 70mm commercial Compak conical burrs, bronze bearings, stepless grind adjustment, built to last forever.
That was a beginning of a rather amazing direction-change and new beginning for the couple and their business.
The Orphan Espresso business was born because of Mr. Garrott’s love for tinkering and repairing things. He was also an espresso nut, and he and Ms. Garrott had built a business of buying old lever-based espresso machines, completely restoring and refurbishing them, and selling them to a starved subset of the espresso nerd world: the lover of manual, lever based espresso shots. Business was good — perhaps a bit too good — because it was becoming harder and harder to find old beat up consumer lever espresso machines to restore and sell for a reasonable profit.
The couple saw that there was also a cottage industry demand for hold manual coffee grinders. So they delved into that market; finding antique and vintage box grinders and repairing and refurbishing them for sale. They soon counted the number of grinders refurbed and sold in the thousands, and the easy availability of orphaned manual grinders was drying up as well.
Along the way, they learned the ins and outs of manual grinders, and how the older, antique models were so much better built than any (then) current generation model. Some were amazing espresso grinders; others did near perfect brew grinds. One day, Mr. Garrott was ruminating over all of this, and staring at a shiny Compak K10 Professional Barista grinder he had sitting on the bench. Inside were these monster sized conical burrs designed to grind thousands of pounds of coffee.
“We took the burr out and asked a question – can we use this in a hand grinder?” Mr. Garrott said. “Can it even be turned by hand?”
Well, yes it could, and the end result was the Pharos Grinder, introduced to the public on April 1, 2011.
Fast Forward to Today and OE Hand Grinders
Many grinder designs and releases later, a move to having their products manufactured in a high quality plant in Taiwan (thanks to the help of Baratza’s Kyle Anderson, which is another story we’ll share soon!), and now OE Hand Grinders is considered by many as the pinnacle of hand grinding technology. Their lineup now includes the Pharos (you can still buy one!), various grinders in the Lido series, The Apex Grinder (which we’re posting a first look on soon), the Fixie grinder and the just-released Lido OG grinder.
The Lido OG grinder is a kind of full-circle project for the Garrotts. They started making hand grinders to address those who wanted a super controlled and quality espresso grind, and the OG delivers that, as well as a rather unique way to move back and forth between an espresso grind and a brew grind.
As Ms. Garrott puts it, “our goal was a grinder that you could dial in for espresso using a stepless adjustment, and be able to move your adjustment on the coarse range to do pourover, and move back again to the espresso range without risk of changing your adjustment setting. This is because generally once you’ve dialed in your espresso you don’t want anyone to touch it; you know what espresso geeks are like: ‘don’t touch my grinder!’; ‘don’t touch my machine, I finally got it dialed in!!!’. And I think we’ve successfully created that.”
The Lido OG is also being released almost 10 years to the date of the original OE Hand Grinder, the Pharos. Because of this, the Garrotts are having a pretty special contest to celebrate this.
Win a Lido OG Grinder
There’s a pretty amazing contest going on as part of Orphan Espresso’s 10 years of hand grinders: you can win one of ten Lido OG grinders. The contest ends on April 10, 2021 (so get in there! there’s only a few days left as of this blog post!), and anyone anywhere around the world can win one (you just have to pay any duties and taxes; the Garrotts will cover shipping).
This contest is quite generous, considering that Orphan Espresso is still a relatively small company and 10 units of this grinder represents a full 2% of their inventory of that grinder. Heck, I’d love to enter myself, but man, if I won, people would howl about it!
At CoffeeGeek, we’ve always loved the Garrotts and everything they’ve done with regards to coffee and espresso. When I bought an Olympia Cremina lever machine (restored) back in 2006, I relied on Mr. Garrott a lot for advice on how to get the most out of the machine. It’s so good to see all the success they’ve enjoyed and the fantastic products they produce. You seriously cannot buy a better hand grinder.
About the author
Mark has certified as a Canadian, USA, and World Barista Championship Judge in both sensory and technical fields, as well as working as an instructor in coffee and espresso training. He started CoffeeGeek in 2001.