Grinding Your Coffee
If you’re new to specialty coffee, the best way for you to achieve the freshest coffee is to grind at home with speciality coffee grinders. You can purchase coffee from most fresh coffee roasters and choose the best grind size to suit you. For example, you might prefer stovetop grind, cafetiere grind, or somewhere in the middle. Grinding size impacts the flavour because more of the coffee is soluble once it is smaller. However, it is well worth taking responsibility for this small, but rewarding stage in the process.
So you need a coffee bean grinder for home, but where do you start?
Blade vs burr coffee grinder: Coffee grinders come under 2 types. Firstly, there are blade grinders which use steel blades to reduce the coffee beans in size. These options are usually cheaper, but don’t actually “grind” up the coffee. Their opposite is the burr grinder. Revolving burrs move together to grind the coffee down, which is much closer to the actual definition of… grinding. Despite costing marginally more, always opt for the best grind with a burr grinder. This is because their mechanical setup achieves a much more consistent grind size and provides the choice of coarseness or fineness to the grinder. Whereas the blade grinder’s settings are limited to being switched on, or off.
Manual vs electric: Burr coffee grinders come in both handheld and electric options. You can certainly pick up a good electric option for cheap, such as the Melitta Molino. But to feel even further involved with the process, the handheld coffee grinder wins. You are able to feel each and every bean go through in some cases!
Grinding your own coffee and experimenting with the best grind is one of the best parts of the whole coffee lifecycle. The smells that are created by grinding your own at home are second to none. To achieve this, you needn’t spend big but make sure you look after your burr grinder in order to get the most use out of it…