Mahlkönig EK43

The EK43 is a large floor-standing coffee grinder made by Mahlkönig, a German brand owned by the Hemro Group, which also owns the grinder brands Ditting, Anfim and HeyCafé.¹ Mahlkönig sells it as an “Allround Shop Grinder” — a shop grinder being the machine behind a counter that grinds a bag of beans for a customer, rather than one that grinds a single shot into a coffee machine.²

Two things make it worth a note of its own. It is unusually large for what it does — a 26 kilogram, roughly waist-high machine with grinding discs nearly ten centimetres across.² And it is the only grinder in specialty coffee with an origin myth attached, because in the mid-2010s cafés started putting a bulk filter-and-spice grinder on their espresso bars and arguing that it made better coffee. That story sits below, with the parts nobody has actually documented flagged as such.

What it is, mechanically

The EK43 is a flat burr grinder. Two steel discs face each other, one fixed and one spinning; beans fall into the gap and come out the size of whatever gap you set. Mahlkönig’s own figures:²

	EK43
Burr diameter	98 mm
Burr material	cast steel (“premium cast steel burrs”)
Burr life	approx. 6,000 kg of coffee at a medium setting
Max nominal power	1300 W
Idle speed	1450 rpm (50 Hz) · 1760 rpm (60 Hz)
Grinding rate	19–21 g/s normally · 10–12 g/s at Turkish-fine
Size (W × H × D)	23 × 82.8 × 41 cm
Weight	26 kg net · 30 kg gross
Certifications	CE, CB, ETL Safety, ETL Sanitation

A few of those numbers say more than they look. 98 mm burrs are large — big discs cut each bean over a longer path at a lower relative speed, which is the usual explanation for why the output is comparatively even. Kaffeewiki, a German community reference, puts the same point in one phrase: the EK43’s discs “erzeugen besonders wenig Fines” — they produce particularly few fines, the dust-sized particles that over-extract and turn a brew bitter.³ That is the whole of the EK43 argument in one clause, and it is the same argument Coffee grinding makes about evenness beating the number on the dial.

19–21 grams per second is a bulk-grinding rate. A double espresso is about 18 grams, so the machine is built to empty a retail bag in under a minute, not to dose one drink.

The grind adjustment is stepless — a continuous collar rather than clicks, so you can land anywhere between settings.³ There is no built-in doser and no timer; you hold something under the chute and it fills. The bean hopper is plastic, removable, and closes with a slider so it can be lifted off while still full of beans.³

Mahlkönig markets it across the full grind range — “filter, espresso, or turkish fine coffee grinding” — and, with different burrs fitted, for “spices, grain, poppy seed and linseed.”² The spice and grain line is not a curiosity; it is what the machine was originally for.

The short one: EK43 S

The EK43 S, introduced in 2018, is the same grinder made shorter so it fits under a counter.³ Same 98 mm cast steel burrs, same motor, same certifications; height drops from about 83 cm to 68 cm and weight from 26 kg to 24.5 kg, with a much smaller hopper.⁴³⁵

Why specialty coffee cares

For most of its life the EK43 was ordinary shop equipment. Kaffeewiki describes it as a “Ladenmühle für Kaffee und Gewürze” — a shop grinder for coffee and spices — and rates it as especially suited to filter coffee and French press, with espresso listed only as conditionally suitable.³

What changed was an argument about grind uniformity. In January 2014 the Australian barista Matt Perger launched a personal technical site whose opening run of articles — roughly 4,500 words — was about this one grinder, arguing that more evenly sized particles let you extract more flavour before bitterness arrives. Cafés worldwide subsequently put EK43s on their espresso bars, which was at the time a strange thing to do. That episode, its sourcing, and the Barista Hustle education business that grew out of it are recorded on the Matt Perger note; this wiki has not been able to verify the competition-stage part of the legend (see the callout below).

The mechanical follow-on is Burr alignment: large flat burrs only deliver an even grind if the two discs are genuinely parallel, which is why the EK43 became one of the most-modified grinders in the trade — aftermarket burr sets, shims, and the lapping method Scott Rao published in 2019.

To verify

Mahlkönig’s own numbers do not agree with each other. The official EK43 product page read for this note gives a bean hopper of about 1200 g.² The manufacturer’s own downloadable product sheet gives 1500 g, and Kaffeewiki independently states 1500 g.⁶³ The product sheet PDF was too large to fetch here, so the conflict could not be settled at the source. Height is the same story: 82.8 cm on the official page and product sheet,²⁶ but 77 cm on Kaffeewiki.³ Kaffeewiki also describes the motor as direct-drive running at 1480 rpm where Mahlkönig lists an idle speed of 1450 rpm at 50 Hz.²³ A retailer listing cited in the research report behind this note gives a grinding rate of about 25 g/s against Mahlkönig’s 19–21 g/s.⁷ Treat hopper capacity, exact height and rpm as document-dependent.

The EK43 S hopper. Mahlkönig’s own EK43 S page reportedly lists about 250 g, while Kaffeewiki and several distributors say about 800 g.⁴³⁵ The EK43 S page returned HTTP 429 to this machine and could not be read directly, so the S-model figures above come from Kaffeewiki plus distributor listings. Capacity most likely depends on which hopper ships with the machine.

To verify

When it was introduced. Kaffeewiki dates production to “ca. 1970 – today.”³ That is a single community-maintained source with an explicit “circa” on it, and no Mahlkönig document read here states a launch year. Do not quote 1970 as a fact.

The competition story. The widely repeated version — that the EK43 broke into espresso via championship stages in the early 2010s — is not documented in any primary record consulted. The research report behind this note says outright that the grinder’s role in World Barista Championship or World Brewers Cup results is not documented in its sources, and this wiki’s Matt Perger note already flags that no source confirms whether Perger used an EK43 on stage at all. Competitors’ equipment sheets are not publicly browsable. What is documented is the 2014 writing and the adoption that followed it — not a specific win.

“Fewer fines” as a measured result. Kaffeewiki’s claim that these burrs produce particularly few fines³ is a community-wiki assertion, not a published particle-size distribution. No laboratory comparison against other grinders was found in the sources behind this note, and — as Coffee grinding records — the Specialty Coffee Association publishes no standard for particle-size distribution to measure against.

Related

• Coffee grinding — grind size, evenness, and why the grinder matters more than most equipment
• Burr alignment — getting the two discs parallel; the mechanical half of the uniformity argument
• Matt Perger — the barista whose 2014 articles made this grinder famous
• Barista Hustle — the education business that grew out of that writing
• Espresso · Espresso machine — the application the EK43 was never designed for and ended up serving
• Pour-over brewing — the filter brewing it was designed for
• Cupping — where grind is fixed by rule, so grinder differences show plainly
• Extraction yield — what an even grind is ultimately protecting
• Scott Rao — published the burr-lapping method used on grinders like this one
• Third wave coffee · Specialty coffee — the movement that adopted a spice grinder for espresso

Official links

• Official site — Mahlkönig EK43
• Official site — Hemro Group

Footnotes

1. Hemro Group ↩

2. Mahlkönig — EK43 Allround Shop Grinder ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

3. Kaffeewiki — Mahlkönig EK 43 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²

4. Mahlkönig — EK43 S Mehrzweckmühle — returned HTTP 429, not readable from here ↩ ↩²

5. Grafikus Coffeetec — Mahlkönig EK43 S — distributor listing, cited in the research report ↩ ↩²

6. Mahlkönig — EK43 Allround Grinder product sheet (PDF) — exceeded the fetch size limit here; figures via the research report ↩ ↩²

7. Seed of Aroma — Mahlkönig EK43 — retail listing, cited in the research report ↩