So you’ve been reading up on coffee, trying to up your game a little bit. And after a whole morning of reading, all paths lead to the same conclusion: you’re gonna need to grind your own coffee if you want to brew tastier coffee at home.
But the amount of choices out there is just overwhelming. And you probably still don’t know what kind of grinder you want, let alone what you actually need. Well—don’t worry: in this article, we’ll help steer you in the right direction so that you can purchase the grinder that is actually right for you.
The most important question, though, is whether a spice grinder (also known as a blade grinder) is sufficient or if you need to get an actual, dedicated coffee grinder. Why do we ask this?
The Spice Grinder: Is It Enough?
The convenient thing about a spice grinder is that, well, you’ve probably already got one in your kitchen for spice grinding purposes. You can grind all kinds of stuff in there—even coffee, actually. The other pro about these grinders is that they can be quite inexpensive, particularly if you compare them side by side with coffee grinders.
But let’s take a closer look at spice grinders and whether they serve this particular purpose effectively enough to be considered a good option.
As we mentioned earlier, this type of grinder can also be called a blade grinder because it uses blades. Coffee grinders, on the other hand, use burrs. So what are the pros and cons of blades?
Well, blades don’t grind so much as they just cut everything in their path. This might seem a little unimportant, but it isn’t. Because you can’t adjust the blades to cut more or less, what you end up having is a mix of different-sized particles. This is highly, highly ineffective for brewing coffee.
Think about it: depending on the brewing method, you need either fine, medium, or coarse grind. If you use a blade grinder, you’ll always get the same thing: a mix between coarse, medium, and a lot of powder. You cannot change settings to achieve a consistent result, which is very limiting.
Using this grind size, the only really viable type of coffee you can make is French press coffee, which uses coarse ground coffee. If you try making any other sort of coffee, you’ll fail miserably because the grind size just isn’t the correct one. And, on top of that, it’s inconsistent.
But let’s stop dragging the spice grinder. It can, in fact, be a good tool for making coffee. If you’re okay with a coarse grind, then a spice grinder is a great inexpensive way to get your daily fix. Not having to occupy extra space in your kitchen, spend extra money; all of this has its own value. Plus, a blade grinder is often less noisy and takes up much less space on the counter than a coffee grinder.
The Coffee Grinder
Some people might say those coffee grinders are the “true option.” Although this is a bit of an unfair claim, there are a lot of things to be said in favor of the coffee grinder.
A coffee grinder works very differently from a blade grinder. It uses burrs, which means it grinds in a similar way that grain is ground in order to obtain flour. That’s right: it works just like a mill. Although they are not designed for grinding to that extent—you can’t obtain such a fine powder, but the principle is the same.
And these burrs can easily be calibrated. You place them farther away from each other to create a coarser ground and closer together to create a fine ground. Some coffee grinders can have as little as three settings—fine, medium, and coarse—while others are so sophisticated that they can range from 50 to 100 different settings. These are the kind of settings that separate amateur from professional machines.
There is one point that seems to elude many coffee grinder advocates: they were created, at first, to grind coffee in massive quantities. It was ground in basically a factory and then shipped all over the country or even the world. And many of today’s machines are still modeled after those kinds of big machines—most of them are designed for grinding way too much coffee. Their sheer power and capacity are ridiculous for a home machine.
Luckily, there has been a response to this: manual grinders. These are mechanical, person-operated grinders that have a sort of crank that you twist in order to grind the coffee. They are very small and can normally churn out just enough coffee for one cup. But they are just as good at grinding as a regular coffee machine because they use the same principle: burrs.
And the best part is that they take up no counter space and are quite inexpensive.
Conclusion
Spice or blade grinders aren’t the ideal options for grinding coffee, but they’re still a tool that can prove useful if you find yourself in need of it and are unable or unwilling to buy a coffee grinder. They might not be as customizable or efficient as a coffee grinder, but they still get the job done and are simpler machines than a machine to grind coffee.
A coffee grinder is a very efficient machine, but it can often be too large and too expensive for home use. Not to mention, they are overkill in most cases; a lot of the so-called home coffee grinders can easily handle the workload of a small coffee shop.
Luckily for us, there has been a recent explosion or revolution in the manual grinder world and there are now tons of very efficient, high-quality manual grinders that present a third, even better option to this conundrum. Manual grinders are easy to operate, compact and portable, and relatively inexpensive. Many professional baristas today use manual grinders.