Best Coffee Grinder

A coffee grinder is a requirement if you want to make the best coffee at home.    Has this ever happened to you?  You go to a coffee shop and enjoyed an amazing cup of coffee.  It’s so good that you buy a bag of ground coffee to bring home with you in the hopes of recreating that coffeehouse taste.  But no matter how hard you try, does the coffee you brew at home always falls far short of that flavor you remember?

It’s not magic, you are missing an important part of making great coffee. It needs to be fresh ground!

We searched reviews all over the internet when trying to find the best coffee grinder for our own use at home and picked the three best coffee grinders depending on your budget. If you don’t like to wait, here is the summary:

Top All Around Coffee Grinder:
Capresso Infinity Burr

Best Lower Cost Coffee Grinder:
Krups Fast Touch Blade

Top Of The Line Espresso Coffee Grinder:
Rancillo Rocky

 

The magic that you are missing at home is fresh ground coffee.  You can buy the best coffee maker in the world, but without fresh grinding your coffee, it’s never going to have that aroma and taste.  Not all coffee grinders are created equal either.  Some are far better than others, but you don’t need to break the bank for a great home grinder.   For the price of a few weeks worth of big coffee chain mornings, you can have your very own high end grinder.

What Makes Fresh Ground Coffee Beans That Great?

You wouldn’t think about it when looking into your cup, but the flavor of coffee is very much about oils.  A properly roasted coffee bean has a large number of different flavorful oils contained within the bean.  Coffee beans are a vegetable after all and we are all familiar with the myriad forms of vegetable oil available on the market.  These oils are transformed during the roasting process, similar to the reaction that turns a boring old raw potato stick into a french fry.

Once a coffee bean is crushed, those oils begin to evaporate almost immediately.  After 30 minutes, the majority of flavor oils have completely evaporated.  You can freeze dry your ground coffee, vacuum seal it, pack it in a can right after grinding and slow down this loss, but nothing you will do will stop this process once the beans have been ground.  Other than immediate brewing of course.

Don’t believe it?  Try it for yourself.  Go to your favorite coffee shop and ask them to grind you some coffee to take home.  Take a good whiff of it as you walk out the door.  What you smell is your coffee flavor rising into the air, never to see the inside of your cup.  Put that coffee in the freezer for a few days.  Take it back to the coffee shop and ask them to do another grind.  Smell your old coffee vs the one just ground and you will be amazed at the difference.

Even Single Cup Brewers Can Enjoy Fresh Ground

Even if you use a single cup brewer like those made by Keureg, you can enjoy fresh ground coffee too.  There are a number of products on the market that match the K-cup size and shape that take fresh ground coffee.  Keep those prepackaged cups for when you are in a rush, but grind and fill your own reusable K-cup whenever you have the time for a better single cup of coffee.

How To Choose a Great Coffee Grinder?  Know The Types!

There are three main types of coffee grinders available to the home grinder today. If you can’t afford the very best coffee grinders, or even a good grinder, you will still get an amazing taste difference with ANY grinder.

The Burr Grinder – Until recently, a standard burr grinder was the biggest bang for your buck.  They are typically priced under $100 and there are a few models available for around $50.  The burr grinder uses two similar sized and shaped grinding wheels to crush the beans between them.  The grind can be adjusted by changing the distance between the metal wheels.  While it is possible to get a good espresso grind from a burr grinder, a conical burr grinder will do a much better job.  It will be very difficult to get a decent turkish coffee grind from a regular burr grinder.  The largest drawback to a burr grinder is that it needs to be disassembled and cleaned of excess grounds on a regular basis.

The Conical Burr Grinder – The sweet spot for home coffee grinding has recently become the conical burr grinder.  Until recently it was hard to find a decent conical burr grinder for less than $150, but recent price breaks have hit the $80 mark for a high end adjustable conical burr grinder.  Similar to a regular burr grinder, the conical version has two metal cones of different sizes, one inside the other that grinds the coffee beans.  The greater surface area allows for much finer grind precision and the shape of the cones allows for more of the coffee grinds to fall all the way through, requiring much less frequent cleaning.  If you want to make your own espresso or lattes at home, this is the grinder for you.

The Blade Grinder – The economy model of the coffee grinding world, the blade grinder is basically a motor that spins a metal chopping blade.  More aptly named a coffee chopper, the blade grinder has a number of drawbacks and really only one benefit.  The price on a blade grinder can’t be beat, with the most popular models clocking in at under $20.  However, it’s impossible to even come close to a good espresso grind with a blade grinder, and it’s extremely difficult to achieve a consistent grind.  The speed of the blade and the friction created tend to heat up the grinds, which can affect the flavor.  However, all that being said, if you are on a budget the price of a blade grinder simply cannot be beat.