Breville Dose Control Pro - Your Ultimate Guide!

Today we’re taking a look at the Breville Dose Control Pro coffee grinder, a slightly older model from Breville, that’s maybe not on the radar of a lot of you home baristas out there, especially compared to its ever popular yet more expensive cousin - The Breville Smart Grinder Pro. The full video review of this grinder is below too! 

Now if, like me, you like to vary your bean intake via both espresso based drinks; lattes, cappuccinos, flat whites etc but also enjoy brewing filter coffee from time-to-time using V60 or Chemex type equipment, you might even be down for some French Press action? This grinder, according to the manufacturer at least, should be the perfect choice… But is it? 

Having used the dose control pro for a few weeks now, there are some really well thought out features that can make it a pleasure to use. Inside the somewhat noisy, engine room of the grinder, are a set of 38mm stainless steel conical burrs or “blades” that are precision engineered to offer a wide range of grind-size settings from very coarse to very fine. 

The 'Dose Control' namesake is provided by a combo of grind texture adjustment (coarse and or fine) and and by a seperate control for varying the grind time Having the ability to adjust these two variables makes it simple to fine-tune things, dial in your grind accurately and hopefully produce the perfect particle size for your favourite brew. 

 

Now, before passing judgement on this little machine, I am first going to test this fabled grind-range and see how it performs at both ends of the spectrum when making first an espresso and then a filter brew. We’ll take a look at the different coffee particle sizes it produces and then I will throw some opinions your way on why you should or maybe shouldn't buy yourself this grinder! And hold onto your seats, because there was one type of bean  that I just could not, no matter what I did, dial it in on the Dose Control Pro! 

Starting with the first test, creating delicious shot of espresso, I found that, in order to achieve this, the Dose Control Pro was just one click short of the finest possible grind setting. Combining this with a grind time of 10 seconds gave me an 18g dose of ground coffee, ground coffee with a very even and compact texture that could be pinched into little peaks. Nice! 

Just a quick side note: It bugged me that the grind setting had to be so fine, way down the scale at literally '1'. I wondered what might happen if I had to make it even finer - there was no more adjustment left Aggghhh!!!  But luckily Breville had obviously had similar anxieties around this and have designed an easy to use method to calibrate the blades and get an even finer (or coarser) grind, and see are the steps...

Firstly unlock the hopper and remove the excess beans and half ground… What do we call these half ground beans? Chaff? Nuggs? Let's go with Nuggs! 

Then lift the little steel handle, twist this inner burr carrier anti-clockwise and remove it. If you've been using the grinder for a few shots already, give it a quick clean and then look closely, you should see the words 'Finer' and 'Coarser' and a little arrow. Pop the steel handle out of its locating holes, and make your adjustment by moving the inner part here towards, in my case finer and I actually went down to number 2. The burr carrier can then go back in, twist clockwise until it clicks into place, pop the hopper back on and you should now have some extra adjustment travel here and have a finer grind.

There's a lot of talk out there on the forums about the different flavour profiles between conical burrs and flat burrs, burrs that sit above one another in a parallel style. My Boi Lance Hedrick has a video on this that is well worth a look - link below. My daily-driver Rancilio Stile grinder has flat burrs more commonly associated with commercial grinders and I must say, this little grinder that’s literally a fifth of the price really surprised me when it produced an espresso with noticeably different flavour profiles, and I mean that in a good way! It was bloody lovely! 

 

 

Okay, with a bit of jiggery-pokery under the hood, this little weapon can make a mean espresso. But what about filter coffee? 

Just between you and I, Hot Froth our little YouTube channel has been growing very quickly just lately and it’s all thanks to you, the lovely people watching and interacting with our videos that I would like to say a special thank you to! 2025 is going to be a great year and we would love to bring you more and more coffee related content, keep growing and invest in better equipment… so if you could please hit the subscribe button, it would be a massive help to us here at the channel…. Now back to the video! 

I might get slaughtered in the comments for saying this, and being a filter coffee drinker myself, in my opinion there is a wider range of grind size for filter, pour over and Moccamaster type coffees and therefore a more forgiving margin for error when compared to making espresso. 

As an example, I ran out of filter roast beans this week but did have a bag of coffee in my fridge that I had pre ground for Cold Brew, one of the coarsest of the grind size gang and usually a lot further around the grinder dial than pour over, but having no real choice I used the same 60g dose of this in my Moccamaster and…it was bloody delicious! But there is definitely a sweet zone within the filter coffee grind size range and that's what I’m hoping to find with this machine.

I am going to test it on “filter” and see what happens… 

The particle size and feel look pretty good. They’re fairly even in size and not just a bundle of misshapen, static changed rocks! A weird observation but they even sound right as they get poured into the filter paper! 

A good indicator is the draw-down time. We want our V60 to finish somewhere around the 3 minute mark…

Ok I think that was a success really. The Breville Dose Control is a simple to use, relatively cheap yet powerful grinder offering a wide range of grind settings… we only tested two and there's loads more here to get stuck into if coffee is you passion and you’re in the early days of your barista journey, this is a great machine to sample different roasts, brewing methods and brews. 

There's not really much here not to like. Sure it's not the quietest grinder out there but it is quick, delivering 18g of pretty-fine espresso ground coffee in about 10 seconds. 

It is heavy on the plastic, and that's probably where it lacks in sound insulation, but it still feels quite sturdy. 

I'll tell you what it is with this grinder. It feels like the prototype for the Smart Grinder Pro, and who's to say it’s not? You can see, what look like, early versions of ideas like the locking mechanism, burr carrier and Blade tool that Breville have tweaked, refined and made work really well in more recent equipment.

But if you’re in need of a decent grinder for good home-made coffee and you just happen to be conscious of cost, then the Dose Control Pro here represents a bit of a bargain and offers quite a good bit of bang for your buck!

Are there many or any dose control pro fans out there? Is there a cult following for this grinder? Is it similar to the Porsche 944 or the English Bull Terrier, not everyone's cup of tea but some people are into them? Let us know in the comments guys, we always love hearing from you - and, if you’re lucky, you might even get featured in our fan of the week section…