A Beginner's Guide to Coffee Grinders

[Music] welcome to today's video which is a beginner's guide to coffee grinders because there's a lot of different coffee grinders out there which is the right one for you which one meets your needs which is the best value for money now what we're going to do today is cover a little bit of theory at the start on coffee grinding right understanding what's going on why it's something worth worrying about why it's something worth spending money on a bit of equipment to do it and then in the second half we'll talk through all of these grinders here and talk through the features that you get what happens when you spend more money and you i hope at the end of it will feel well equipped to buy a coffee grinder that meets your needs and have even better tasting coffee every morning one quick thing i'm not going to necessarily recommend specific models nor review specific models in this video where i've talked about grinders before there'll be links down in the description you can watch those i've done a number of different videos on particular grinders today these are kind of representative grinders of different technologies or different features just to kind of explain what's happening when you spend more money but let's start with the theory let's start with what happens when we grind coffee why we grind coffee in the first place now a whole coffee bean is a wonderful thing but it doesn't make a good tasting coffee water cannot get to all of the flavor because it can only sort of get to the very outside of the bean and so if you put whole beans in hot water some flavor will come out but really not very much and so we grind it we smash it into little tiny pieces because what we're concerned about first and foremost is exposing sort of more surface area and the finer you grind anything the more surface area that you have and the easier it is for the water to get in there dissolve the flavor out get it into your cup of coffee and for you to have a better more delicious cup at the end of it now one of the big cells you'll hear for a coffee grinder is that freshness is actually a really key aspect of grinding coffee and that's true when you smash coffee you expose all of the surface area and it means everything that you've exposed can begin to go stale and there are three ways in which coffee goes stale the first and to me kind of saddest is the idea that you just lose those flavors they go what's called volatilely float off into the atmosphere and those flavors and aromas essentially wander off you'll smell them for a minute and then you won't get to drink them later so that's kind of a thing so the older coffee is the more flavor it essentially just loses to the air to the atmosphere the second thing that happens is that you have what are called sort of stalin reactions where different compounds combine with each other and begin to create new flavors that often aren't particularly nice and so after a little while your coffee will taste measurably worse as well as being less interesting and then the third thing is oxidation and that will happen to sort of some of the fats and oils inside coffee they will oxidize and essentially begin to go rancid it's not a great smell or taste rancid oil and rancid oil in all forms smells a little bit fishy and that's true with coffee so very old very stale rancid coffee is not something i would recommend and the best way to avoid all of those things is really only to smash the coffee bean to pieces when you want to immediately then brew it that way you capture a lot more flavor you have less loss of quality it's just a better time all round now occasionally on the internet you'll see a thing that says pre-ground coffee from a very very very good commercial grinder will make better coffee in many cases than fresh ground coffee from a very cheap coffee grinder and that's an interesting test and study that was done i think it ignores some of the other reasons to buy a coffee grinder we'll get to in a second but but really what isn't to be underestimated is just the pleasure of grinding coffee in that moment there is an enormous release of smell that is fantastic that moment of grinding coffee be it in the morning first thing or in the afternoon it's a pleasure not to be missed so from that perspective alone a coffee grinder is worth having and if you own a pepper grinder of any kind then you owe it to yourself to own a coffee grinder too if you drink coffee now the second thing that gets talked about a lot is called grind uniformity and that's the idea that when you grind coffee ideally the little pieces that you make should all be the same size because when you come to prepare them later brew them into a cup of coffee the more uniform the size is the better they'll give up their flavor in a more uniform way and that makes sense from anything in the kitchen if you're trying to cook some potatoes if you cook a little tiny piece of potato and a whole potato they'll cook at very different rates and they probably won't cook well together same thing with coffee grinding right if you are trying to brew loads of little tiny pieces of coffee alongside loads of very big pieces of coffee you'll get a lot of flavor out of the tiny pieces and not very much out of the other pieces and this can result in a very unbalanced unpleasant cup of coffee those tiny pieces can add some bitterness those giant pieces can add some sourness and those two things combined are not how i want to start my day so as we talk through grinders you'll hear me reference this idea of grind uniformity and it is important it helps you make better tasting coffee to have the pieces be a very similar size you'll have less unbalanced less unpleasant cups of coffee more delicious cups of coffee now the third aspect of coffee grinders that's very important of coffee grinding that's very important is grind size control the ideal grind size for espresso is very different from the ideal grind size for something like a french press for example right with espresso you want lots and lots of very fine small pieces because you're going to extract that coffee with very little liquid to make it very strong with a french press you might want to grind it a little bit coarser so being able to control the grind size is really really really important particularly so in espresso but we'll touch on that a little bit later so that's it that's the key information to think about as we go into looking at these different grinders it'll help us to understand why you might want to spend a bit more money here or there but before we get into that there's a quick ad for this video sponsor which is skillshare skillshare is an online learning community full of thousands of classes for creative and curious people like you and me then you can explore new skills you can deepen existing passions or you can challenge yourself creatively as i have been doing recently i've really enjoyed andy j pizza's class it's 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blades they're not very sharp they kind of just smash the coffee down into little pieces the longer you run it the finer the coffee will be but the problem with these is that you really don't have any control meaningfully over grand size to have really the same ground size every time is quite tricky and to have a uniform grind size is extremely unlikely this kind of act of violence of just smashing the coffee beans instead of cutting them creates a lot of very fine pieces that can add a lot of muddiness and bitterness and kind of dullness to your cup of coffee in the morning i'm not saying you can't enjoy coffee made with a blade grinder and there's some some hacks you can do too to improve the quality of its output that's linked up here if you're enjoying coffee with a blade grinder now you could really really be enjoying your coffee a lot more with a better grinder that offers you a little bit more control and uniformity if you own one of these and you're upgrading from it do not throw it away they make for fantastic spice grinders they are useful to have around but to grind coffee they are a little bit frustrating so then we move from what are called blade grinders into the rest of these which are called burr grinders so inside these you've got two cutting discs one spins against the other and controlling the distance between the two controls how big the pieces are when they finally get out of the grinder into the collection bin below where you're gonna sort of take them and then pour them into your brewer or whatever you're gonna do with them this is a classic kind of entry-level hand grinder it's relatively cheap it's about 40 pounds and a lot of people choose to start their sort of grinding journey here with one of these because it's not a huge investment and that's true you'll have some control of the ground setting in something like this you can control the bird distance this is a conical burr grinder so you've got a kind of cone-shaped main burr that spins inside this thing conical burrs are popular in a lot of grinders they have a larger cutting surface which helps you kind of grind more coffee through kind of per turn which is useful this is in contrast to what are called flat bur grinders where you have two discs or rings of cutting teeth one spins against the other same control mechanism you just move them further apart for a coarser grind or closer together for a finer grind now the burrs and cheaper hand grinders especially tend to be made of ceramic this is a cheaper material to produce they don't cut quite as cleanly so your grind uniformity isn't quite as good as a metal bur but as an entry level thing they work okay what you tend to see also in cheaper bird grinders is a little bit of wobbling from that bottom bar as it's grinding because it's not stabilized super well because they're trying to keep costs down that will also result in a less uniform cup of coffee so if you look at going from say 40 pounds up to 100 pounds right you've got the same basic technology you're going to be doing the work here you are turning you're working to crush the coffee between those burrs now here you go from a plastic construction to a metal construction and you go from ceramic burs to metal burs so it's a big jump in quality going from 40 pounds to save 100 pounds now with the previous grinder and this grinder and the next grinder too they are what's called stepped grinders where you adjust the grind here at the bottom by fixed amounts this is sort of a step that kind of clicks into place and that's controlled movement that means that you've got pretty good control over ground size but not infinite control in a way and later on we'll talk about stepless grinders but for the purposes here steps work very well they're repeatable they're useful to have this will do a better job grinding coffee than the 40 pound grinder buy a good amount actually by not needing a motor by having you do the hard work you can kind of invest a bit more in the other things like the bur quality and get better results for less money the downside of course is that you have to do the grinding every time every morning and if you're grinding a lot of coffee that can take a while and it is hard work grinding coffee is relatively physical that can change with more expensive grinders or bigger grinders but ultimately hand grinding is something you have to kind of enjoy doing as you go from 100 pounds up to something much more expensive in the hand grinder world generally you're getting an increase in construction again this is better made this feels solid it's great materials but really you're going to be paying for better grinder uniformity and that's what more expensive hand grinders generally offer and at this price point the grinds coming from this are very very good and you can grind effectively for espresso with an expensive hand grinder it's really hard work but you can do it or you can grind for filter coffee pretty well so that's kind of what you've spent with hand grinders going from something pretty cheap cheaper materials cheaper burr construction less uniformity and that's what's increased as you've gone up and up and up so there are lots of reasons to have a hand grinder it might be that you travel a lot it might be like camping it might be that just you enjoy that whole thing but if you are at home you're grinding coffee every single day then i would recommend investing in an electric coffee grinder and that's where we start here so this grinder here is cheaper than this hand grinder it's a little bit more expensive than this grinder here but it's a great way to start the day you have an electric motor in there and that's spinning a conical bur set and that's what you tend to see at entry-level decent home electric grinder price points now cheaper grinders will have cheaper motors and because grinding coffee is hard work a cheaper motor will overcome the sort of power needed to crush those beans by just spinning faster so you'll tend to see cheaper grinders have faster rpms on their motors they don't always grind coffee through the burrs quicker but they will generally be a little bit louder that motor spinning generates some noise if it's spinning very fast the way it cuts coffee you'll just get a bit more noise in the morning this grinder as you tend to see at this price point is a stepped grinder so you've got fixed steps and it's not really able to do espresso right we talked about having a cheaper motor spinning a bit faster but when you're grinding very very very fine you need a lot of power you need a lot of torque in that motor and cheaper motors just can't do it so you tend to see cheaper grinders like this are great if you need filter coffee but not great if you're trying to brew espresso if you look at say a filter dedicated grinder at about 125 pounds going up to say 250 pounds then you see a variation in the features that's kind of interesting this grinder was initially designed to hold like a bag of coffee in the hopper here and have a little timer on the side that you would adjust and you'd push go and it would grind for a fixed amount of time to dispense the amount of coffee that you wanted but that's not how many people want a coffee grinder to work you want what's called a single dose grinder we're going to put in what you need and no more in terms of coffee beans for that drink that batch whatever it's going to be it might be that you want to keep the coffee stored and sealed away and not sitting in the grinder it might be that you have more than one coffee at home and you want to vary one bean to the next a grinder like this is designed to be a single dose grinder you can't really fit that much coffee in the top here so you'd only pour in what you'd need instead of having a timer this has an auto shut off that stops the grinder when it's no longer grinding coffee this grinder like this grinder is a stepped grinder so you've got fixed increments that you can adjust the grind size by and this grinder is also a filter coffee only grinder its motor its setup is really built around filter coffee and not espresso what you tended to see historically was when you when you need espresso you had a dedicated espresso style grinder and this is a pretty good example it's a bit of a jump in price because you've got a more substantial motor in there and this is about i think 350 pounds which is some pretty serious money now this is designed really to be a dedicated espresso grinder and it's a little bit more traditional in its design which means it's got a large hopper on top to again hold a big bag of coffee beans in there and grind what you need when you need it many people choose not to do that as i said and use these as a single dose though you'd probably want to replace this hopper with something more appropriate what you see as you go from a filter coffee dedicated grinder to an espresso dedicated grinder is not just the ability to grind finer but you tend to see stepless adjustment right where you control the fineness or the coarseness it's usually just a wheel that you can move as little or as much as you want espresso requires very small adjustments to grind size to have quite a substantial change in the way that the coffee brews so you want as much control as is possible so that's what you tend to see in a dedicated espresso grinder this will grind using time so you push go and it'll grind for say 9.2 seconds to give you a consistent dose of coffee this kind of grinder you can buy in a huge number of different configurations from different manufacturers you'll have different motor sizes different burr sizes different burst shapes you know different kind of technologies controlling how much coffee it grinds as it grinds but the base principle is kind of there if you're grinding for espresso you need that more powerful motor and that tends to mean you need to spend more money and that's where your money is going now these two grinders are emblematic of more modern approaches to grinders this kind of grinder has existed for 60 if not 70 years now these are much newer as you'll see they're both grind to order grinders they have no real space to hold much coffee they'll hold a single dose and no more but they're also designed to go all the way from coarser filter grinds through to very fine espresso grounds this one is a flatburr grinder and this one is a conical burr grinder this one is a little bit cheaper i think about 400 pounds this one is a little bit more expensive at 500 pounds feature-wise they're both very similar you're grinding into a little collection bin that you might then use to pour into a pour over or pour directly into a porter filter if you're making espresso now the difference in price between the two might come down to the design and construction of these the materials used or the components used it might also come down to their approach to things like retention now retention isn't something that we've talked about yet but it is something that's actually very important and you'll see discussed in a lot of different grinder reviews when you put coffee beans into a grinder it'll go into a chamber that holds the cutting discs those spin those push out the grounds ideally all of them but typically not quite all of them there might be anywhere from 0.2 of a gram to 2 grams or even sometimes more stuck inside the grinder that the mechanism is unable to completely push out now with more traditional designs like this one that wasn't considered a huge issue because you know it'll be pushed out when you grind for coffee the next time the downside is when you change your grind you'll have some of the retained old grind setting that you would need to purge out that's a little bit wasteful and the more you need to purge out with a grinder the more wasteful that grinder is some commercial grinders can need 20 or 30 grams purging not acceptable but that's how things were for a long time more modern solutions might need a couple of grams if anything at all so design around retention is really a key thing here you've got quite a different approach the retention is dealt with by the sort of innate design of the bird chamber here you've got a bellows where you'd push down that would blow air through the grinding chamber pushing out the last bit of coffee into the collection cup below that's the kind of idea there how a grinder deals with retention be it bellows or be a little knocker on the side of it is something you should think about and decide how you want to spend your money because it will impact your kind of workflow in the morning do you want to have to go and clack a thing a few times or press the bellows a few times if it doesn't bother you and it saves you some money then it's worth considering but retention is important and retention is discussed a lot when you watch other reviews of grinders on youtube or read about them on websites so the understanding i think is really really really key now one last note on on conical versus flat burs and i don't want to get too deeply into an esoteric discussion here but some people believe that conical burs suit espresso a little bit more that having a little bit more diversity of size of particle can help give some more texture some more body to your espresso other people prefer sort of flat bird style espresso where you have a little bit more clarity maybe more sweetness but not quite as much texture understanding that is a consideration if you're getting into the fine end of dialing into espresso when you've got a great machine and you want a great grinder to match it but if it's your first grinder it's not something you necessarily need to obsess about until your technique and other aspects of coffee making catch up to that now one last note on burst is that some grinders have options for different birds that you can install grinders like this or this you can install different birds from different manufacturers that will give you different results if you are shopping for a grinder and you're kind of wanting to future proof it considering a grinder that has some options for grinder burs is is one thing to maybe just bear in mind as you're shopping that's not essential but it is a kind of nice to have if you're thinking about buying a grinder that's going to last you for a really long time without worrying about needing to constantly upgrade now these nine grinders i have here are i think viable first time purchases even though we've gone all the way up to 500 pounds i could see this still being someone's first coffee grinder at home i did want to include a little bit more just to explain how people could end up spending enormous amounts of money on coffee grinders for what they're chasing now this grinder on the end is incredibly expensive it's three and a half thousand dollars but i think it's a good example of how far people will go in the chase for better uniformity better construction or better design or better build more control here you've got variable rpm i can change the speed of my motor to achieve different results and how it grinds the workflow is kind of different very nice it's beautiful i can easily switch the burrs out in it you know these kind of details are what you end up paying for now understand that going from a more entry level grinder to something like this is a big leap in quality and a great return on your investment going from something like these up to something like this is an increase in quality but it's a smaller leap it's a more incremental increase for a lot more money and that's true of most things in this world right like the closer you get to to sort of the end goal the more expensive and the more difficult it is to do any sort of an upgrade i'm not saying this is bad value for money but if you're looking at spending a lot of money on a coffee grinder you really have to have some very specific problems that only it will solve for you as a final note these look like they go from sort of the the lowest quality to the highest quality but that isn't quite true hand grinders are a cheaper way to achieve better quality better grind uniformity at lower prices because you don't have to spend money on the motor so you're just spending on bur and construction generally so that is the beginner's guide to coffee grinders and it's there i hope to help you build a little flow chart for you and your needs and your budget if you've got 300 pounds and you want a filtered coffee grinder then i can help you get to where you need to go based on your needs do you want absolute quality for the money or do you want an electric motor to help you do some of the work these are questions i can't answer for you but hopefully now you can answer them for yourself and make a better decision and do know there are still things that we haven't talked about here that are little details that are worth looking out for in reviews things like the not just the loudness of a grinder but the quality of sound does it great on you that kind of stuff things like the user interface does it frustrate you is it quirky is it frustrating is it finicky those things are important and should be looked out for when you're checking out a review before you purchase but now i want to hear from you down in the comments below do you have one of these are you thinking about upgrading to one of these what are you looking for in a coffee grinder and how has this video potentially helped you make a better decision i'd love your feedback i love your thoughts but for now i'll say thank you so much for watching and i hope you have a great day

2021-06-06 13:34

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