OXO Brew Conical Burr Coffee Grinder Expired

I have this and tried the finest setting on it. It will not work for espresso. At least not very well

The cheapest reliable conical burr I'm aware of "for espresso" is the Baratza Encore, and it's often referred to as "just barely enough" for "decently good espresso".

Personally I'm really happy with mine for espresso, although I also bought an upgraded burr for it (Baratza is pretty awesome about making parts available for quite cheap for repairs/etc, with them being built to be serviceable and lots of support for diy repairing, instead of the usual "planned obsolescence" crap you usually see for sale by everyone else selling consumer level stuff).

Obviously, though, even an Encore on sale (which is a bit few and far between, other than when refurbs show up) is likely going to be about double this (and not on sale is even more). I haven't tried the Oxo personally, Oxo claims it can do espresso, reviews seem to… not always agree with that. Personally I tried a Secura conical burr grinder before getting an Encore refurb, and the Secura couldn't do a consistent enough grind and it really did affect making espresso quite a lot. If you want to grind your own espresso, the grinder probably matters even more than the espresso machine itself, so I'd take a "buy once cry once" approach rather than trying to get anything questionable as to even being adequate for entry level espresso and it possibly not being good enough, at this point.

Been using this on and off for about 6? years (yep), paid $100 on sale back then... they've been dropping in price lately.

I haven't used it literally every day in that time, I go through coffee phases where I might use it every day for 6 months, then use it once a week to grind cold brew, etc. So I've probably used it for ~2-3 years worth of "every day" work.

Works great for dark roast espresso, and medium roast if you can get your settings dialed in on the machine to make up for the lack of ultra fine grind. It works well enough for me that I haven't felt a need to upgrade. But I could see why someone might want to. For the price it will hold you over quite a while to figure out if you want to go deeper into the espresso rabbit hole.

Obviously for everything else it works well too, in terms of grind size. Everything other than espresso is easier and I find the grind size is very consistent and has a great range, including sizes that would be too large for pour over but work great for cold brew.

For clogging - have never had an issue with clogging, but - and remember I have had this 6 years, expected this would break it by now lol - I slap the side of it after every grind until I see grinds stop falling out, then run it for a second again, tilt it forward and slap again, and that's usually it. Doing that gets some grinds that get left behind, which does say it's not the best design - and I'm guessing if you don't do that they stay there they start to get oily and clumpy which leads to clogs people get. But I guess on the plus side the construction is sturdy enough that slapping it around doesn't break it (and never do it while it's running!).

As for cleaning - you do want to clean out grinds every few months regardless of clogging, you can get rancid oils in there. Probably won't kill you though - lots of people literally never clean them. But I do similar to what someone mentioned - dust out as much of the coffee as you can, using one of those little duster brushes that come with everything these days. Clean from the burr side but also from the chute side. Give it a few slaps and make sure nothing is falling out of somewhere you didn't see. Then run something to soak up any leftover oils - NOT RICE, as rice can sometimes have hard chunks in them that will damage the burrs, I use plain cheerios, or any other safe, absorbent food like that - they even sell stuff specifically for this but it's basically just overpriced cheerios. I run through a full 2 hoppers of cheerios, dust it out again, try to get all the cheerio dust out because I would rather not have it in my coffee lol, then use a computer duster cleaner to blow the bits remaining out. Before the blower I would just run some throwaway coffee through it to get the remaining cheerios out.

Pain the butt to do all that, but necessary for any burr grinders.

Hmm anymore advice... make sure the catch can is in contact with the metal strip, it should nicely "click" in place when you put it in, and if it doesn't you might have spilled grinds under / behind where the can goes. If you don't put it back in the right place you'll get a lot of static electricity, that metal tab distributes the static generated during grinding back into the dust through the metal can.