P200: 2 years of 2 Option-O P100’s
At the time of this writing, this is the grinder that I enjoy living with the most. However, the takeaway is not an endorsement or a suggestion for you to purchase one; I am not you and I don’t know what your counter-space is like. It is not without flaws and it has taken some thought and effort for me to achieve satisfaction. This evaluation has been two years in the making and has seen every type of burr, bean, and brew method.
For the purpose of testing 98mm burr offerings, I own two units to perform side-by-side comparisons. It was important to keep the models the same to minimize confounding due to burr orientation, carrier design, and RPM implications, e.g. P100 vs. EK43. Unit-to-unit variances exist of course, but to my ability to measure on a dial test indicator and friendly inputs on variances to be mindful of, my units are confidently within tolerance to be comparable.
This post will cover the fundamentals and overarching thoughts on what it’s like to live with. In a future post I will cover thoughts on the 98mm flat burr landscape; therefore implications on cup quality will be sparse in this here post. In another, I will dig into why I do not believe fancy grinders are an assumable necessity to make the most of your beans. Next up would be a follow-up post digging further into my modifications to make the P100 behave closer to my expectations.
A brief introduction to the P100 - it is a grinder unit that can house an assortment of 98mm flat burrs. Option-O is an Australian company, and the P100 was launched in 2021 in response to enthusiast trends towards single-dose grinders that accommodate large burrsets like the ones found in the legendary Mahlkonig EK43, but with sensibilities for home use. It’s not meant to grind whole bags at a time, it’s not meant for cafe volumes with a loaded hopper.
Rotund, portly, and minimalist, it’s a Rorschach test that evokes polarizing interpretations. Some see Squidward or his house. Some see Futurama’s Bender. Some fill in the blanks and install googley eyes onto an alien baby with strangely small, outreached arms. Others find it too unsightly to keep on the counter, whether their own opinion or their partner’s veto for kitchen aesthetics.
It’s a surprisingly maneuverable 15kg chunk, and alongside the Kafatek Flat Max, among the most portable high-end grinders. Packed away safely in the travel case it ships in, it’s a manageable grinder to bring to popups or events such as our local coffee nerd meetups. Powered by a common C13 AC plug you see on other appliances, it is possible to find an appropriate length cable to fit the space and occasion, and I don’t need to worry about a fixed cable that gets pinched and chewed up under its own base.
The functional touchpoints are fairly straightforward: a grind size dial to turn at the top, an RPM dial on the left, power/power+auto-purge buttons on the right, forks for a portafilter or catch cup, and a loose grounds knocker at front and center. It comes with a detachable foot, though I find no practical use for it.
9 or 4?
The first questionable design interaction we find is in the grind size adjustment dial. A sticker indicator that you install/adjust on the rotating dosing chute points to a semi-fixed, numbered disc. On paper this seems benign, if not a bit of a bandage solution. But the moment you turn that sticker clockwise past 2 until coming around past 8, you’ll realize you cannot see the pointer without craning your neck around the grinder unit. Depending on the relative height between you and how high it sits on your counter, you may not be able to see 5 on the back side. This is solvable - a primary/secondary sticker stuck 180degrees apart gives you visibility throughout the range.
But only you’d know about that big sticker in the back, and if you told a first time user to set the dial to 5, there’s a 50-50 they wouldn’t intuitively refer to the primary sticker. To solve the problem of visibility, you can double down on stickers. The solution of two stickers risks unfamiliar users asking “oh there’s two stickers? What’s the difference?”, a self-evident UX failure of “if you know, you know”. I gave pre-2024 Kafatek Flat Max’s a ding in design points due to needing a separate pointer sticker for espresso and filter range references, so this one gets that too.
Embrace chaos
Each tick on the dial is an unintuitive 7.5 microns to have a visually neat 1-10 on the dial, relative to the screw threading. I love when dials use a 1-10 (or 1 -> 0 for multi-rotation) range. The EG-1 gets points for an easy 5microns per tick with 10 marked numbers per rotation. Jkimmakes concocted a printed vernier scale to alleviate this, and it should’ve solved the matter. However, somewhere between the cumber of printing a millimetrically accurate adhesive strip, needing to re-adjust it for each burr swap, and learning to read a perceptually complex system, the micron-perfect solution has succumbed to our sin of laziness; it challenged our assumption that we needed such fine granularity. “Do I care enough to get this sticker accurately printed and further uglify my grinder? Meh….” Realistically, you find a reference number for espresso, another number for filter, and situationally adjust the number of sub-tick offsets by feel, forgetting about the 7.5micron incrementation. It’s not the solution we wanted on paper, but is a plenty liveable solution when you let go of the assumption that you always needed the finest control on every brew. Annoying at first, diminishingly frustrating over use.
Greasy
If you are an unfortunate victim of curiosity to the 98mm ecosystem, the P100 is one of the better selections to help you drown in that choice overload. The rotating number dial that some paragraphs ago was considered a flaw is useful for calibrating a zero point on the fly for temporary adjustments… if you happen to be a person who must have zero be zero instead of temporarily remembering and accepting 1.2 or 0.4 as zero. Unlike some systems that have a hard stop on adjusting finer, the P100 does not stop until you dangerously jam the burrs together. Iterations on adjusting and re-installing burrs is tool-less until you get to the burr screws. The screw threads to open up the chamber are greased, so keep de-greasing wipes handy. Among big grinders, the P100 gives me the least hesitation and preemptive annoyance for swapping burrs and re-alignment.
A spro-heavy diet, knocking while running, and a poorly seated chute will collect more
The chutes are an evolving design, perhaps now complete in the v2. I will cover my modifications and thoughts on the exit rate of grounds in a subsequent post. For now, the takeaway is that across the 3 iterations, I believe the aperture of the declumper and exit chute are too narrow, and that shaving part of it it off lets grounds come out at the rate the burrs are meant to shoot them out at. The knocker is a place for grounds to get clogged up over prolonged use, don’t knock/click it while the grinder is running. Thankfully, it is accessed via one hex screw and is easy to wipe clean. When installing, make sure it is rotated clockwise to ensure its edge is flush to the inner chamber.
Dos amigos
Workflow is many concepts distilled into one word and highly personal to your situation. It is incorrect to interpret as distillable to one dimension and unempathetic to assume that what works for you applies to everyone else. In the case of the P100, even something seemingly benign like the power buttons being on the far right side has been a make-or-break decision for some; the context of where the device lives is related to the flow of using it.
In my time owning the P100, my espresso consumption has diminished. For the times I would grind for that method, I prefer not to grind into the portatilfer. Instead, I prefer to grind into a catch cup so that no matter what the brew method, my interaction points with the grinder remain consistent. If I prioritized espresso and the convenience of juggling fewer objects and touchpoints, especially in a commercial environment, I would swallow the cost of the Hibi forks.
You’d be wrong
The included cup is a visually elegant but operationally awkward design. We pattern-recognize and try to slide the wing slots into the forks like a portafilter, as is the intuitive interaction, but the forks aren’t deep enough to hold onto it; it will fall right off. Bafflingly, the intended design is to place the cup wings on top of the forks. It is a silly interaction that I test first-time users on, maintaining a 100% fail rate.
But what does the foot even do?
There have been several revisions to the cups, but none seem any more effective as any other metal cup; none is obviously less staticky than another. We subliminally equate heft to quality, but in this case to no pragmatic benefit, and I’ve been the unfortunate witness to more than one incident where a misplaced cup slipped and dented the metal foot. The second P100 came with the Versa cup with built-in tumbler/dosing bell, which is designed to get mistakenly knocked, shifted and spill, and ruin your day. That object does the worst possible thing in usability - it makes me fearful of the failure scenario before I’ve picked it up.
The catch cup they give you vs. the catch cup that makes sense
What I use instead is any metal cup with a 3in diameter at the lip. In an ironic twist, the Mahlkonig catch cup that comes with the X54 is perfect fit on the P100 forks. With minimal precision, I toss it onto the forks knowing it will stay. I encounter similarly sized cups every visit to Korean restaurants, there’s plenty of cheap restaurant supply options out there. I’ve also used taller beer cups, giving more headspace to violently shake up and mix my ground dose without using a blind shaker with a lid.
Image source unknown, perhaps old Option-O marketing material
In its first iteration, Option-O included a platform that later owners would’ve appreciated. They know how to make this, but do not currently offer the option to accommodate more workflow styles. Extending the DIY possibilities, the two screws holding the forks could be a mounting point for some creative solutions. Perhaps we could anticipate a Kimoi or FDMbyOptikalBlitz solution to provide more options to suit more workflows.
V60 02 paper for reference
Over prolonged ownership, I’ve found the vacuous internal chamber to be an odd design choice, perhaps to account for just-in-case scenarios. You could, if some batch brew reason demanded, dump ~250g into the chamber to grind on a cold start, substantially more than the 50g-ish capacity of comparable grinders. What this means for standard dosages is unoccupied space for popcorned fragments to ricochet around in, and it’d be possible to 3D print a spacer to fill up these gaps if that bothers you. The removable lid means it’s possible to hide a clever device in there, such as a theoretical slow feeder, screwed onto the screw hole for the anti-popcorn deflection plate. I’ve stuck several baseless conical drippers in there as a funnel to narrow the angle of entry into the burrs, but perhaps this is in the realm of meaningless, unnecessary optimization.
Speaking of opportunities to enhance the design, the slotting holes for the useless foot are another place for creative solutions. If we find that tilting horizontally oriented burr grinders improves performance, we could 3D print a leaning base like we saw for the DF64. A riser base and drawer to store accessories underneath, a quick-detach catch tray for grounds coming out of the knocker, or a riser pedestal to eliminate the forks entirely; plenty of overoptimization to be explored given the mounting points.
The burr you select has an effect on your overall experience, cup quality aside
I’ve seasoned plenty of kilograms without a stall or concerning motor noise, including my failed under-roasts. Give it a V60 03 or similar hat, and it’s ready to do a few pounds at a time. Given the short distance from the motor to the exterior, you can feel by touch when it’s warmed up from working hard. Over those seasoning rounds I’ve noticed that different geometries and coatings cake up differently inside the chamber.
With nearly every 98mm burr going through them, neither unit has had a motor-based hiccup. That said, it is not impossible to stall it if you ran something like an EK43 geometry (less aggressive prebreakers), with the lightest of roasts, at the finest of grinds, at the lowest of speeds. The coating, geometry, and brew method you grind for all impact the mess that cakes up inside. For example, SSP high-uniformity in red speed had a moderate amount of caked material on the cutting surfaces that needed a toothpick to clean each edge, but ZrN coated Titus-SSP Brews and Kafatek Shurikens (?!?!) barely left any residue. The wipers are effective, though they can leave a thin streak along the interior sidewall at the top. There is very little space within the chamber for grounds to remain, though the exit chute is more likely to be a culprit for long-term retention and build-up.
Without shim
With shim
Option-O designed the P100 for SSP burrs, assuming the high-uniformity geometry would be the same spec as future launches. This did not turn out to be the case, and some burrs such as SSP Brew require shims to offset their shorter burr height so the large outfalls aren’t blocked, which Option-O includes if the geometry swap is requested at time of order.
Freedom
Just before it fully seized
Suspending disbelief
Some burrs are even less compatible when the too-precise carrier is mated to imprecise burrs. I ran into this issue with the cast EK43 pre-2015 A burrs, not to be confused with their precise SSP homages. Stuck in the stationary upper carrier, I tried every means to remove it - lubrication, suspension with hook magnets (padded with leather to prevent marring) and mallet tapping, spot heating and freezing, improvised metal hooks to claw them out through the screw holes. The rough outer edge of the cast burr and the fact that it was not perfectly round meant that even if I could get good purchase on the burr, it was abrasively sealed. Many snapped wooden chopsticks later, I felt there was no way to get them unseated through conventional means without risk to the cutting teeth on an unobtainable burr set. My dearest, bestest friend Richard is at times as precise a person as the burr carrier itself, and took on the terrifying task of drilling through past the screw holes and through the carrier to mechanically free them from the back. Sam from Option-O stumbled upon my stumbling and helped me acquire a spare carrier part. The rare burrs live on, and I have an upper carrier to trial new burrs that potentially need a mechanical escape option; thank you Richard, thank you Sam.
I’d use either setting without a second thought
RPM is set on the left side by a straightforward dial marked 1 to 9. It ranges from 200RPM at 1 to 1800 at 9. I’m iffy on this - my day 1 reaction was to wish that the actual RPM was spelled out, but the simple numbering intentionally downplays the invitation to consider RPM-optimizing. At the time of launch, the zeigeist was that slower speed resulted in less fines and therefore more unimodal a distribution and an overall better cup; questionable a few years onwards. We know RPM does something. It moves the mean particle size and fines percentage. It’s possible to have both more fines and a tighter distribution. Fines are unpleasant to discuss and heavily rooted in standards set by historical designs such as the EK43. I would disagree with the notion that fines are automatically the source of bad results in grind quality, and bring up how boulder production is under-scrutinized. The complex decisions made during burr geometry design phase are undoubtedly influenced by the RPM ranges they are developed and tested on, and it is not a safe assumption that a burr designed and tested at 1800RPM is automatically made better by going down to 200. Depending on the efficiency of the various breaking stages and feeding out via centrifugal force, RPM differences may result in different heat generation and transference to the grounds There is no single answer to be had here, and would invite you to consider that your individual patience and surrounding decisions such as slow feeding or shaking may have a more impact on quality of life than the effects of RPM. I will use anywhere from 3 to 7, but not switched at any regularity, and never attributing cup excellence or failure on this variable alone.
Quality of life in terms of how intrusive the grinder sounds is personal and situational. Besides a few screechers, decibel measurements are hardly a useful metric to communicate the pitch and transference of sound through your household. The P100 is not the quietest 98mm, those awards go to the Levercraft Ultra and Kafatek Flat Max. It’s not comparable to the EK43 either. Pegging the Kafatek a 1/10 and EK43 a 10/10 in sound ratings, the P100 I’d rate a 3/10. I live in an apartment with a noise-sensitive partner, and in the mornings or late at night, this is a grinder I would feel less guilty to operate. It’s not so quiet on idle that you could forgetfully leave it running like you might with the P64. Placing a lid on the chamber significantly cuts any remaining noise. Burr, grind size, and RPM you select will have a big effect on sound, the SSP old iteration of LU’s at filter coarseness and speed 4 hardly makes a harsh noise.
One button was designed to be pressed more than the other
Run + auto-purge is a button found ahead of the primary on/off button that kicks up the unit to a speed 10 to try to eject any latent shards. It is intended to kick in around 5 seconds after it stops detecting a voltage drop from bean load but can be recalibrated by holding the RPM button down for 10 seconds. The on/off switch in the back stays depressed while engaged and the auto-purge stays in the same state since it will shut itself off. As far as minimalism in interaction points, these two buttons are a waste of space and creates uncertainty to first-time operators, “Which button does should I press?”. Long-term, one of the buttons will go mostly unused. I do not use the auto-purge due to possible RPM-induced variance in output distribution. If I did more espresso, I may be more inclined to confidently kick out the last few grounds, though this is a non-concern at filter range. If there were a hidden switch, for example, under the unit to toggle between these two modes, there would be less confusion about the similar-but-different button functions. It remains that visibility and discoverability of the buttons are low if you look at the grinder head-on, and for those who wanted to place it next an espresso machine in a specific arrangement or close to another grinder or wall in such a way that the right-side access is reduced, the side buttons could be a long-term annoyance.
Thwacked to oblivion, yet a stray bean at the end
Slow fed, brushed clean
A statement often echoed as a con is that the P100 is slow to grind, especially for cupping scenarios. And often, the comparison is made to an EK43 with the P100 set at a lower RPM. If you use a grinder at its slow setting… it will grind slower. To my standards of using each grinder to feel that there’s minimal contamination between grinds, I do find the P100 quite swift for back to back use. More than other grinders, I am confident that when I use the P100 knocker, minimal static residue is left in the system, and the last bit can be wiped off with the v2 clicker. Despite its ubiquity, I consider the EK43 a poor cupping grinder because of retention and the lack of confidence it inspires among the many places it leaves a trail of staticky grounds. Thwacking it at the start of the session, something will always come out. There will always be some exchange going through. Even cleaning it out regularly, you will find material that fills in gaps or gets transferred into the next dose. With the same catch cup, the EK coats the sidewalls with staticky grinds, even with an Acaia Ion Beam. No matter how much I thwack the knocker, there will be a quarter bean shard that finds its way during the 15-20sec of spinning down. Yes the EK is faster at getting grounds out. But between knocking, brushing, puffing, purging, and considering the overall time to clear it out, I find the the P100 faster, confidently clean, and easier on my conscience. I did need to modify my knocker to really feel good about this result, to be covered in another post.
The elephant in the room is that the fate of the P100 is unknown, as it is effectively succeeded by the Lagom 01. Brian and I have discussed it at length. 102mm blind burrs, the v2 clicker equivalent as stock, corrected number dial, ionizer, and a modular, low-down catch cup/portafilter holder system; every critique seems addressed. I’ve used one, it’s magnificent. And this is where this reviewer’s attachment bias comes into play - I’ve learned to love the wide margin for error in placing my preferred catch cup on the forks, whereas the 01 requires a careful fit to avoid metal-on-metal contact. I’ve modded the exit chute that the P100 design allows for, which I wouldn’t on the 01. I’ve worked around the dial numbering system, but myself from a year ago would’ve yearned for the 01’s dial design. The difference between a review and a long-term review is the shift in perspective from how an initial con remains a begrudging annoyance or something we get used to and fades away. As a gear-mule to community events, I cherish the P100’s more portable form factor, but the 01 is certainly the more titanic centerpiece to a countertop.
When it comes to grinders referred to as endgame, the expectation is that you can solve all your problems (are they really problems?) by upping your budget; this does not exist among current choices. A luxury sports car may be good out of the factory, but there’s always modifications that can be done for more performance. Something as frivolous as the aesthetics of the device, not fitting well on the counter under the cabinets where you’d hoped to put it, or the quality of your beans not being up to par for its demanding nature; no matter how im/perfect the device, the context it lives in is equally important. From the manufacturer, what you get are attempts to cut out pain points that may or may not apply to you. Some issues are fully resolved by the industrial designer’s considerations. Some are subjectively disagreeable. Others can be worked around at various levels of feasibility and DIY, while other issues remain fundamentally unsolvable. I’ve used my two units in many places and many ways, and I couldn’t have known before experiencing first-hand that it is the grinder I want to live with. I’ve avoided discussing flavor results since the scope of this review is what the grinder housing is like to operate, and the impacts of its compatible burrs on flavors will be a follow-up.
So long as there is a 98mm burr I wish to use, the P100 is my endgame housing for it because I’ve made it do what I wish to accomplish. Today, I have little faith something will come out that addresses more of my personal considerations for how I want to use a grinder. However, I have no reason to assume it meets your goals or won’t annoy you in several ways. But until Option-O confirms if it’s the obsoleted second fiddle or the unobtainable predecessor, perspective on its continued existence remains up in the air.