Grinding Coffee

A few years ago I did some research on coffee and wound up buying an Aeropress coffee maker. I would make coffee on the weekends, but eventually I would have headaches on the weekends, so I stopped drinking coffee. By collecting Kellogg’s box tops on line, I eventually earned a free bag of Gevalia coffee. So I started drinking coffee again and Gevalia is certainly better than Publix store brand. I was running low and thought it was time to actually buy a bag of coffee. Consumer Reports generally rates Eight o’ Clock coffee as the best of normally priced, widely available coffee, so I got some of that when Publix had it on sale.

This morning I opened up my new bag of coffee. Beans. I didn’t realize I had gotten a bag of whole beans. Unfortunately, I don’t have a grinder and my last experience with grinding coffee at a store did not go well. I knew David had a burr grinder which he doesn’t use for coffee anymore, but I didn’t think he would care (he had left the house to go hang out with Eric). I found his grinder, but it had chocolate in it, so I didn’t want to mess with that. I thought maybe I could buy one online, but even the hand-cranked ones are about $20. I also saw an electric one that uses a blade and is their most popular grinder. That made me think of my Magic Bullet blender that Mom gave me the Christmas after David stayed with me the first time (he told her I needed one). So I ground up a spoonful of beans in the Magic Bullet. It worked, but it was still pretty coarse even after grinding for a while. As I drank my coffee (which was okay, maybe a little weak), I read up on using a Magic Bullet for coffee. It turned out that the 4-blade attachment isn’t as good for grinding as the 2-blade attachment. And the blade grinders in general tend to produce very uneven size grounds, with some coarse and some very fine, which doesn’t matter that much with the Aeropress since it uses a paper filter anyway. You probably get less coffee flavor out of the coarse chunks. But otherwise everyone says you definitely need to grind your own beans and make coffee immediately to get the best coffee. So maybe this mistake will turn out okay. Later on I made a second cup of coffee using the 2-blade grinder and I think it worked better but there was still a lot of coarsely ground coffee in the mix. The experts say electric grinders heat up the grounds and make them lose flavor whereas the hand and even electric burr grinders give a more uniform particle size that is needed for making espresso.

4 thoughts on “Grinding Coffee”

  1. David let me borrow his burr grinder. I had to clean out all the chocolate in there that he had been using in the grinder. Then I must have put it together wrong, because it didn’t work well at all and I ended up using the Magic Bullet again. He said it should work better than that, so I tried it again and it was much more effective this time, steadily crunching up the roasted beans until they were all gone. I have to admit that the burr grinder makes a more flavorful (stronger) cup of coffee than using the Magic Bullet. Maybe because the Magic Bullet spins it around so much, some of the flavor is lost. Or, as some claim, the heat, though I don’t know that it gets the grounds that hot when you are just doing a little.

  2. Three years ago Mom bought me a hand cranked coffee grinder for my birthday. I didn’t want to pay to get the nicer Hario like David had, so I got the stainless steel cylinder one that dozens of different companies offer on Amazon and picked a cheaper one. Grinding 1-2 cups worth a week, lately it seemed like it was letting some bigger chunks through. Then yesterday it just stopped working. I could turn the crank, but nothing would happen. There was a plastic part that held the burr cone (which is ceramic) that had broken. I could get another cheap cylinder grinder for about $15 (though some are $30 and look to be exactly the same thing; the Hario ones are about $34), but then somebody posted that you could get a replacement plastic part and burr cone for $5, so I will try that. Since I was midway through grinding coffee, I used the Magic Bullet to grind the leftover. Since I don’t drink much coffee and a bag can last me several months, I think grinding the beans when needed is a way to keep the coffee a little fresher.

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