Rhino Hand Grinder Review (by Bart B)

The Rhino Hand grinder review

Since a couple of years, at work I have only been drinking filter coffee. Before I had to drink pod coffee. I disliked it, and decided to completely switch to freshly brewed filter coffee. Caffenation filter coffee, of course.

Until recently, I used the Grindripper to freshly brew my coffees. It's not a bad tool to start manual brews, absolutely not. However, especially the grinder from the Grindripper was showing its limits with very intensive usage, with grinds being unevenly. The grinder itself was also hard to tune finely, which caused some frustrations in the morning.

Time for an upgrade! I got a Clever dripper with Filtropa filters. The only thing left to improve my morning coffees was a new manual grinder, which can handle my morning coffees.

When Rob asked me to test two grinders, I happily agreed to do so. 

In this post I will highlight my experience with the first grinder, the Rhinoware manual grinder, aka the Rhino.

As you can see from the photos below, the design of this grinder is attractive but nothing too spectacular. The metal finish looks good and avoids the typically more fragile plastic parts. A black, sturdy rubber ring helps you hold the grinder while grinding without dropping your morning coffees. The Rhino comes with a black pouch, a nice extra touch. 

Operation is quite simple, take the top lid off and fill with beans. Put the handle on top of the Rhino and start doing your thing. The grinding itself can be controlled in the bottom compartment which gathers your ground coffee. You can adjust the grinding by turning a screw which clicks into place. Compared to the Grindripper screw which always seemed to come loose this feels much better.

Then for the grinding itself, how does this thing perform? Quite well actually, especially given the price. As you can see from the pictures, my grinds were even and perfectly suitable for filter coffee. I do not believe you can use a Rhino for espresso grinds, but few if any manual grinders are up to this task anyway.

So are there no bad points to the Rhino then? Of course there are. One thing which might bother you is the rubber band. It can shift during grinding, depending on your enthusiasm. Nothing too bad, but it might irritate you. Another issue, which is more serious, is the sealing of the different compartments. Sometimes to lower compartment tends to come loose slightly. I never noticed it coming loose completely, so it's not that serious. However, it is a weak point.

To conclude, I really like this Rhino grinder, both its design and its performance are really attractive. It has some minor issues but it's not expensive at all, which means this is a perfectly affordable solution for manual filter coffee grinding.

After this review we were informed about new improvements the builder did on this Rhino :
"On the next one which you will receive we have made the outer burr tighter on the chamber and now it doesn’t move, we have tested and this improves grind. It doesn’t completely eliminate the bigger chunks but goes from around 15% big chunks to around 8-9% which is better."

That's what we want to hear. 
The Rhino Hand Coffee Grinder sells in our Caffenation shop for €39. 

And is included in our magnificent Ultimate X-Mas Gift Box Set : Aeropress, Rhino grinder, Caffenation mug and a bag of coffee to your choice for only €70. Already on the shelf!

Next up: a completely different grinder, as you will notice from its looks. The Lido.