Affordability is a fundamental consideration when buying an espresso grinder. Eureka, an Italian brand known for their first-rate, handmade grinders, married quality and affordability in the Eureka Mignon Notte.
The Mignon Notte has the same grind capabilities as some of Eureka’s best grinders but forgoes extra features to make the grinder more budget-friendly. It’s manual dosing and more noisy than peers models, but the quality is exceptional, and I think it’s a great value espresso grinder.
In this Eureka Mignon Notte review, I’ll explain the features Mignon Notte keeps, what it leaves out, and how that affects both the user experience and the coffee quality.
Eureka Mignon Notte Product Overview
Eureka Mignon Notte highlights:
- Aluminum Body
- 50mm flat steel burrs
- Bottom burr adjustment
- Stepless adjustment
The Eureka Mignon Notte is one of the most accessible and affordable espresso grinders in its class. It produces a clean, flavorful espresso at half the price of Eureka’s more iconic grinders.
Creating a more budget-friendly grinder means sacrificing some quality-of-life features. The Mignon Notte has just a single button for manual dosing, can’t program presets, and has no sound dampening. The original name is “Manuale” for a reason.
Those sacrifices don’t affect the Mignon Notte’s grind consistency or build quality, however. The aluminum construction makes for a durable machine, and the 50mm flat steel burrs deliver an admirable grind quality. The stepless adjustment system lets you dial in espresso with almost infinite precision.
The same quality isn’t found on coarser settings, but the Eureka Mignon Notte isn’t trying to be an all-purpose coffee grinder. It was designed for espresso, and it excels at it. As long you have a scale for dosing coffee yourself, the Mignon Notte creates a cafe-quality espresso in your kitchen.
Pros
Sturdy construction
Great grind quality on espresso settings
Good value
Cons
Only supports manual dosing
No sound dampening
Some inconsistencies on coarser settings
Eureka Mignon Notte Feature Breakdown
Design and Durability
From the outside, the design and construction of the Eureka Mignon Notte look exactly like its more premium Eureka cousins. It has the same boxy shape and modest footprint at about 14 in. tall and 5 in. wide.
The monochrome black paint job and sleek design give this coffee grinder a modern look on par with any grinder in the Mignon lineup. That goes for the build quality, too, since the construction features the same aluminum body as something like the Mignon Specialita. It’s as sturdy and durable as any top-tier coffee grinder. The only plastic components are the 12 oz. hopper and portafilter holder, but neither of these feels cheap.
The Eureka Mignon Notte has a manual dosing system, meaning the grinder only runs if you hold a portafilter against the button directly underneath the grind chute. There’s no timer and no programming. You can’t do hands-free grinding on the Notte.
Manual dosing isn’t a problem if you use a scale to weigh your beans and use the Mignon Notte as a single-dose grinder (which is what I typically do). However, this coffee grinder won’t save you time or streamline your workflow. It will grind coffee (really well), but that’s it.
Also, the Mignon Notte doesn’t have any sound dampening on the burr or the motor. The other Mignon grinders are fairly quiet, but the Notte has a shrill pitch without the sound insulation. The Notte doesn’t have the rumbling bass like the Baratza grinders, and it is bearable to me. But it’s certainly louder than the other Eureak grinders and other low-RPM models.
Burr and Grind Quality
The Eureka Mignon Notte features 50mm flat steel burrs. These burrs are slightly smaller than the 55mm burrs used on the Mignon Specialita, but they still deliver an excellent grind consistency on espresso settings. There is some minor clumping on the finest settings, but it’s nothing a WDT tool can’t fix.
The Mignon Notte loses some consistency the coarser you go. While it still makes an admirable pour-over, I don’t recommend the Mignon for coarser brew methods. Even on a medium-coarse grind setting, there’s a noticeable accumulation of fines. This isn’t a surprise since the Mignon Notte is designed to function as an espresso grinder, and it’s not trying to make a quality French press. The Mignon Notte also suffers from poor grind retention, but that’s common on most flat burr grinders. It doesn’t do anything to improve grind retention, but it’s not any worse than other grinders in its class.
Grind Adjustment Settings
The Eureka Mignon Notte is a stepless-adjustment grinder, and it’s very responsive to minute changes. The adjustment dial is located on top of the grinder, in front of the hopper, and is easy to reach. It tells you which direction to turn for a coarser or finer grind, making adjustments easy.
I think the adjustment dial is too small on Eureka grinders, including the Notte. Small grind adjustments matter a lot for espresso, and it’s hard to make small adjustments on a small dial with Eureka. For example, the difference between 2 and 2 and quarter setting matters, but that’s a fraction of an inch rotation.
There is a 3D-printed kit from FusedLine that creates a bigger middle dial so you can more easily track settings. It’s easy to install, and I recommend checking it out here on Etsy.
A unique feature of the Mignon Notte’s adjustment system is that it changes the position of the bottom burr, not the top burr. On many grinders, disassembling the burrs for maintenance requires adjusting the grinder to its coarsest settings, where the top burr will then disconnect from the assembly. This means that when you put the burrs back together, you have to do the work of rediscovering your preferred setting.
On the Mignon Notte, you can disassemble the burr mechanism without losing your setting. On a grinder that’s as precise as the Mignon Notte, keeping your grind setting when performing routine cleaning and maintenance is a huge plus.
Flavor Profile and Use Cases
Eureka excels at espresso grinders, and the Notte maintains this reputation. The Eureka Mignon Notte produces a clean and balanced espresso shot.
Eurkea designed their burrs to produce a unimodal grind distribution, that is characteristic of flat burrs. Unimodal means that the ground coffee particles are largely the same size (harder than you think), which leads to a clearly-defined flavor profile. The Mignon Notte will accentuate the natural brightness of light and medium roast coffees, which work well here. You don’t have to stick with “espresso blend” to get a good shot with this grinder.
However, the Mignon Notte is best used as a dedicated espresso grinder because the coarser you go, the muddier the flavor becomes. Essentially, the burrs have smaller teeth that are designed for espresso. On coarser settings, fines will accumulate as some beans get re-ground while others come out quickly with a larger gap. This diminishes the uniform grind size and coffee becomes more inconsistent. Because of this, a pour-over from the Mignon Notte will tend to highlight the coffee’s body, while espresso will highlight the coffee’s sweetness.
I love the espresso flavor, but I don’t recommend using the Mignon Notte for anything coarser than a pour-over (if even that).
Value
For its performance, the Mignon Notte is of great value. It can produce at-home espresso that rivals the shot of a specialty cafe while costing less than high-end espresso grinders.
I actually categorize the Mignon Notte as a top-tier grinder; it’s just missing the frills, bells, and whistles of its competitors. You don’t get the features of other espresso grinders (like a dose timer and programming), but the grind quality on espresso settings is comparable to top-tier grinders.
You’re paying purely for the coffee quality, but it’s quality that’s well worth the price. If you have a moderate grinder budget and cup quality is your highest priority, then the Mignon Notte is a good option.
Comparing Eureka Mignon Grinders
While Eureka has an extensive lineup of grinders, the Mignon line is excellent for brewing espresso at home. The Mignon Notte is just one of many Mignon grinders, and each has different capabilities according to different needs.
Eureka Mignon Specialita
Eureka Mignon Specialita highlights:
- 55mm hardened steel flat burrs
- Insulated motor
- Touch screen
- Stepless grind adjustment
If the Mignon Notte is like a Ford Focus – a reliable, consistent workhorse – then the Mignon Specialita is a Mustang. We’ve done a full review of the Eureka Mignon Specialita, and it improves on the capability of the Mignon Notte with larger 55mm burrs and a host of UI features.
The Mignon Specialita features a dose timer and two preset times that can be accessed from an LCD touchscreen on the front of the grinder. The motor is insulated to reduce sound, and the burrs are treated with a patented Diamoninside process that improves their longevity. The larger burr diameter creates an even more consistent grind size for a cleaner flavor profile.
Basically, the Mignon Specialita does everything the Mignon Notte doesn’t, and what the Mignon Notte does well, the Mignon Specialita does better.
However, all that improved functionality comes with a high cost. The Mignon Specialita costs about twice as much as the Mignon Notte. In an ideal world, I would take the Specialita over the Notte because of its higher quality. However, the Notte has a comparable grind quality to the Specialita, and I’m happy to live with manual grinding and a louder motor if it saves me a few hundred dollars.
Eureka Mignon Silenzio
Eureka Mignon Silenzio highlights:
- Sound-insulated Case
- Stepless 50mm Burrs
- Bottom-Burr Adjust
The Mignon Silenzio has two major advantages over the Mignon Notte: time-based dosing and sound insulation. The burr design is the same, though.
The front interface of the two grinders looks the same, but the Mignon Silenzio has an adjustable timer on the side that allows you to program your desired dose. It also has rubber sound dampeners at the motor mounts to make for a quiet grinding experience. The Specialita is already relatively quiet and easy in the morning, but the Silenzio becomes very quiet.
The Silenzio has the same 50mm flat steel burrs as the Notte, so you’ll get the same flavor profile and nothing to add there.
The Silenzio is about $150 more expensive than the Notte, and that extra cost goes solely toward the dosing capability and quiet grinding. If those features are important to you, then I think the higher price is worth it. Otherwise, you get the same coffee quality from both grinders.
Eureka Mignon Perfetto
Eureka Mignon Perfetto highlights:
- “Easy Setting” grind system
- Sound insulation and anti-vibration
- Special 50mm burrs
The Mignon Perfetto is a more user-friendly, versatile coffee grinder than the Mignon Notte. It features a touchscreen with time-based programmable doses and a color-coded adjustment knob that tells you which brew methods work best with different settings. It has a fairly wide settings range, and it makes a decent French press as well as a good espresso. The espresso isn’t as clean as the Mignon Specialita, but it does non-espresso methods better than most other Mignon grinders.
Like the Mignon Specialita, the Mignon Perfetto costs about twice as much as the Mignon Notte. I personally think the Perfetto falls short on its espresso quality, and there are better all-purpose grinders on the market for cheaper. The Mignon lineup is known for its precise espresso, but the Perfetto tries to be more versatile and, in doing so, loses the grind consistency that’s the hallmark of other Mignon grinders. That wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t pushing $700. No matter your preferred brew method, I think there are better value options than the Mignon Perfetto, like the Baratza Sette.
Should You Buy the Eureka Mignon Notte?
As a basic, functional, affordable espresso grinder, the Eureka Mignon Notte excels. It doesn’t have the features of some higher-priced grinders, but it does its most important job well. If you’re looking for a dedicated espresso grinder and don’t mind doing the work of weighing and dosing yourself, the Mignon Notte is a great choice.
Comparing Coffee Grinders
If you’re in the market for a home espresso grinder, there are plenty of options outside of the Mignon lineup. Read our roundup of espresso grinders to find the best grinder for your setup.
