Coffee Burr Grinder
Coffee Burr Grinder
For the ultimate coffee lover, you cannot beat a cup that has been brewed from freshly ground beans, and most times this means going and getting one from a coffee house or coffee shop. However, why not grind your own beans and get that shop bought feeling from home? There are two main ways to grind beans at home: by using a coffee burr grinder and by using a blade grinder. The blade grinder tends to be the most common option as this is the cheapest form of coffee grinder.
Unlike the coffee burr, the blade grinder as it sounds uses a blade to chop the beans, but the mechanism has little control over the size of pieces created. This is far from ideal when trying to create the perfect home brewed coffee, as when the hot water is added to uneven pieces of bean you get a somewhat uneven brew, and the taste is noticeable. One possible solution is to grind the beans for longer to get a more even bean cut, and this will make the beans more even in size. However, because the blade is moving quickly and has to be metal to grind the beans it creates a heat reaction and can burn the beans, so in order to get the best coffee from a blade grinder one has to have the perfect balance of grinding time to avoid either problem – which frankly is almost more effort than it is worth.
The best way to get that perfect coffee brew is to have a coffee burr grinder which is more expensive, but if you really are a coffee connoisseur you are going to be so glad you bought one of these grinders. There are two coffee burr grinders on offer, the wheel burr and the conical burr, and again there is a difference in price. The wheel burr is the cheaper option and is better than the blade grinder. The wheel burr is a spinning wheel, which crushes the beans against a non-moving surface. Due to the high velocity of the wheel this form of coffee burr grinder can be quite noisy, and due to the force of the wheel there is also more mess to clean up, which makes them effective but slightly irritating.
The most superior coffee burr grinder model by far is the conical grinder, which works on exactly the same principle as the wheel grinder. However, this time the grinding wheel spins much slower so the noise is much less irritating, and also a slower spinning wheel creates less mess to clean up. It also opens up the way to grind some of the more specialist-flavored coffees and oily coffees, and the conical grinder will not clog unlike most other models. The bottom line is this. If fresh coffee is your thing and you want to be able to grind your own beans at home you need to spend the money to get a coffee burr grinder – a conical grinder if at all possible. If this is out of your reach financially then get a wheel grinder, but try to avoid the blade grinder.
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