Is organic pepper harder than conventional?

[raweater]

I've had 3 peppermills break within minutes or seconds of use. Either I'm extremely unlucky or organic pepper which I use is much harder and regular peppermills break themselves before they manage to break the organic peppercorns.

Does anyone know if organic pepper is harder?

[MysticTree]

I use a pestle and mortar - I've never been happy with the quality of mills. They seem always to fragment bits of the mechanism.

[raweater]

Ironically the best mills I had were two $15 electric mills I got at the grocery store years ago.

This winter I saw a manual two in one mill I really liked and bought it and sold my 2 electric ones on eBay. Then the new one broke, I replaced it, it broke again at the same place, I got another model, it had a different problem, I returned it, I got 2 new electric ones, both failed after 2-4 seconds of use.

Now I'm sick of all these pepper mill problems and realize I need to stop buying the cheap ones, so I'm about to buy 2 Breville electric mills from Australia for a total of about $90, but this time I'd like to know if it's organic pepper that's the problem because I don't want to have $90 mills break, and I'm not sure the warranty is valid outside of Australia, I'll have to check that too.

Hmm maybe I can buy one of those cheap ones that keeps breaking at the store, out non organic pepper and see if it keeps working.

It's hard to tell because by pure coincidence I only put organic pepper in the cheap ones that broke, so I have to way to tell if it's the cheap mills or the organic pepper that's the problem, because 100% of the ones that broke were cheap and had organic pepper, and for some reason I had never put organic pepper in the cheap $15 I had before that lasted 5+ years and still going strong.

[MysticTree]

try a pestle and mortar ... they last for years.

[raweater]

I have one but there's absolutely no way I'm dragging that thing out several times a day each time I want salt or pepper. I'll get a quality set of pepper/salt mills this time, I've understood the cheap no name brands are all less than worthless and none of them work, but my income has been increasing constantly for a few months so I can afford a quality set of mills now.