Coffee Grinding

The smell of freshly ground coffee can be irresistible and indescribable only because you paid attention to the coffee grinder alone. Grinding your own beans at home will make a huge difference to the quality of your coffee cup, compared to the pre-ground coffee.

The purpose of grinding coffee beans before brewing is to expose enough surface area to extract enough of the flavor that is locked inside the beans. If you brew the whole beans, you will end up with a weak brew. However, the finer you grind the beans, the more surface area is exposed, which means the coffee is brewed faster because the water has more access to it.

This is important when you consider how finely you want your grind because different brew methods have different coffee grounds. The size of the coffee grounds changes the speed of the coffee brew, so it is important to grind the coffee beans at the same size. In addition, grinding the coffee exposes more of it to the air, which means that the coffee will go stale in a short time, that is why you don’t grind the whole package and only a small amount of ground before brewing.

How to grind coffee beans?

Unfortunately, not all coffees should be treated equally in the grinder. Darker roasters are more fragile in the grinder and you may need to grind a little coarser. Likewise, if the coffee is at a much higher altitude than you normally drink - for example, you drank a delicious coffee from Brazil and then switch to a coffee from Kenya - you may need to go better in your grinder. for brewed coffee. After making the change a few times, you can make a well-mannered assumption when changing coffee and prevent too many bad dishes.

It is not easy to communicate the size of the shredding Terms such as “coarse”, “medium” and “fine” are not particularly useful because they are relative. There is no common setting for grinder manufacturers either, so setting a grinder to a numeric setting of “5”, for example, will not replicate the grinding of another grinder set to the same setting, even if it is the same model.

There are two main types of coffee grinders available for home use:

The Blade Grinder

These are ordinary and cheap electric grinders. They have a metal blade attached to a motor that rotates and breaks the coffee into pieces. The biggest problems are that this breaking action produces some very fine powder and some very large pieces. When you make ground coffee in this way, the tiny pieces will quickly add a bitter aroma to the brew, while the larger pieces will add an unpleasant acidity. This uneven preparation will not be very pleasant.

Beans ground in a blade grinder (left) will have a more uneven size and will make a less pleasant infusion than those ground in a grinder (right), which has two cutting discs.

The Burr Grinder

The Burr grinder is a common grinder that is available in both manual and electric models. The grinder has two cutting discs, called burrs, that face each other and you can adjust the distance between them when you want to change the size of your coffee ground. The ground coffee grounds are cut down to the size of the gap between the burrs, which means that the grounds cannot escape the grinder, and the size of the ground will be even. Burr grinders are ideal for brewing great coffee because the grinder produces even pieces and it can be adjusted to a wide range of sizes.

Burr grinders are more expensive than blade grinders, however, the manual models are relatively cheap and easy to use. However, if you enjoy coffee the burr grinder can be an invaluable investment, especially when you are brewing espresso. Besides, the ground side for espresso is extremely important because even variations of a few hundreds of a millimeter can make a difference.

It is important to get a burr grinder that has a good motor capable of grinding the beans very fine, usually, these grinders are designed for espresso. Some grinders are designed to grind for both filter coffee and espresso, but most of them do one or the other.

Different manufacturers use different materials when it comes to burrs, some of them are from steel or ceramic. However, over time the cutting teeth on the burrs will become dull and the machine will start to mill the coffee instead of cutting it cleanly. This is really bad because the coffee will taste flat and bitter. It is recommended to often change the burrs: new burrs are small but worth it when it comes to your coffee-brewing setup.

People who see coffee as a hobby will most likely upgrade their equipment from time to time. It is strongly recommended to invest in a better grinder first. The expensive grinders have better motors and the cutting burrs are capable of more than just the uniform grind size. With this type of grinder, you can make a good cup of coffee even when using a small domestic espresso machine.