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 satisfaction in anticipation of that first sip.
Literally like fresh beans, good tool and a loving hand make all the difference to the finished product, so too does the grind. Eventually, whatever the grind profile you prefer, the end objective is uniformity.
Coffee grinders start at around $20 and you can pay hundreds or even thousands for a serious grinder. 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 every day ritual, your next worthwhile investment must be a worthy grinder.
At entry extent, coffee grinders will either be the manual or electric burr mill or the electric blade grinding machine.
Bur Grinder
A burr coffee mill, 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 Coffee mill
The electric blade coffee grinder, 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 coffee grinder there’s a good chance it’s an electric blade grinding machine. These are all utilizing the same principals as a branded bean grinding machine would.
Burr Coffee mill Vs Blade Coffee grinder
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 coffee mill.
Burr grinders improve coffee extraction by ensuring all the coffee particles are extracted equally.
The manual burr grinders are a best camping/travel companion and will give your arms a good workout if nothing else. It’s likewise 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 process and have lived happily through the occasion.
The blade grinding machine 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 very consistent in grinding a uniform profile and some won't give you the range of grind profiles required 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 post here: Coffee Grinders .