It can be said that this area is where you fine tune your engine, developing your hand as you work through a gamut of grind sizes from fine to coarse, discovering which one is right for you. All the while recalling the flavour, mouth feel and pleasure in anticipation of that first sip.
Simply like fresh beans, good equipment and a loving hand make all the difference to the finished product, so too does the grind. Ultimately, whatever the grind profile you prefer, the end purpose is uniformity.
Coffee grinders start at around $20 and you can pay hundreds or even thousands for a serious mill. If you haven’t outlaid thousands for a commercial machine or buried money into a barista course but you do have surplus cash to invest in this on a per day basis ritual, your next worthwhile investment ought to be a worthy coffee grinder.
At entry extent, coffee grinders will either be the manual or electric burr coffee grinder or the electric blade coffee mill.
Bur Grinding machine
A burr coffee grinder, grinds the coffee beans between two revolving abrasive surfaces. The distance between the two abrasive surfaces is set by the user and determines the size of the grind. When the distance is larger, the grind will be coarser (larger granules) and when the two abrasive surfaces are set close together, the grind will be fine (smaller granules).
Blade Grinder
The electric blade coffee mill, uses high speed spinning blades to slice through the coffee. You may well have an example in your pantry already. If you own a bar mixer, stick blender or spice grinding machine there’s a good chance it’s an electric blade grinding machine. These are all using the same principals as a branded bean coffee mill would.
Burr Grinding machine Vs Blade Grinding machine
The burr coffee grinder controls the grind size by setting the distance between the burrs (abrasive surfaces). This technique gives the user more control and is more capable of producing a consistent grind than the choppiness of the propeller blades in a blade grinder.
Burr grinders improve coffee extraction by ensuring all the coffee particles are extracted uniformly.
The manual burr grinders are a great camping/travel companion and will give your arms a good workout if nothing else. It’s also a back-up for when you have a caffeine urge in a power outage.
A purist might say ‘a Ninja with a Samurai sword would do a better job on your beans than a blade grinder’. That said, I have brewed my share of stovetops using this method and have lived happily through the occasion.
The blade mill tends to hack at your beans as the blades rotate at high speed. The user controls the grind size by the amount of time the blade chops away at the beans. These types of grinders are not extremely consistent in grinding a uniform profile and some will not give you the range of grind profiles necessary for different styles of extraction.
Necessary tools for styling coffee
This post was worth syndicating, all the credit goes to Moka Head, a website that takes Moka Pot coffee seriously. Check the original article here: Coffee Grinders .
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