Every morning you make your coffee and every morning you don’t understand why it doesn’t taste as flavorful as a cup from your local coffee shop. What tricks do those baristas have up their sleeves?
To start: whole beans and a coffee grinder. A coffee grinder will completely change your addicted love of coffee for the better.
So what makes this simple tool so important?
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Why Do You Need a Coffee Grinder?
The coffee grinder brings premium freshness. For a guaranteed tasty cup of coffee, it’s essential you grind whole beans right before brewing. After a few minutes of coffee being ground, it loses its’ aroma and flavor. A personal coffee grinder helps you avoid the stale, bitter taste you would get from coffee that has been packaged pre-ground.
Another benefit of coffee grinders is the versatility in flavors you can create with your different machines. You make these different flavors by particle size, meaning whether the coffee is ground to be coarse, medium, fine.
The best news? You don’t have to buy various packages of different coffee. For instance, if you have a package of course ground coffee but want to make an espresso shot, it will turn out muddy and lose a lot of its’ flavor. Instead, thanks to your grinder, you can create this desired effect with one package of whole beans.
To Burr or to Blade
So, what kind of grinder suits your needs?
For Beginners
Well if you are a beginner to the world of coffee grinding, then I would suggest testing the waters with an easily accessible option: Blade grinders.
Blade grinders cut up the beans with, exactly that, blades. They usually have a timing mechanism to control the ground particle size. These are your cheapest types of coffee grinders and can be found in most home appliance stores.
The lower cost does come with a few sacrifices though. Grinders with blades tend to create more inconsistent chunks making it difficult to achieve the perfect fine coarseness for espresso and Turkish coffee.
Keep in mind, to avoid grinding inconsistency, you should make sure that your blades are not dull. For some tips and tricks to sharpen and take proper care of your blades, you can check out this guide here.
For Coffee Connoisseurs
If you’re looking to invest a little more and really want to achieve that artisan-crafted flavor, then a burr grinder will be the choice for you.
Rather than slicing the beans with blades, the burr uses a crushing method with a rotating motor attached, creating just the right amount of pressure, humidity, and evenness for your coffee grounds.
Since burr grinders have a precise consistency to grinding, they tend to be more expensive. You can expect to pay anywhere starting at $50 and up into the hundreds.
A Delicious Cup of Joe
Figure out what you’re ready to invest and how often you will want to brew coffee at home. Once you decide, you can pick your coffee grinder type, and then you’re that much closer to making a delicious cup of coffee.
