If you want to make really good coffee at home, you need to be grinding your own beans.  Let’s face it, if you buy pre-ground coffee more than half of the flavor is already lost before you even open it up.  It isn’t your fault, but those coffee beans exude tons of oils that you want in your cup of coffee – not in the air at the grocery store you bought it at.  So it’s time to start looking for a good coffee grinder, so that you can make better tasting coffee – coffee so good your friends will ask what it is that you do to make it taste the way it does.  Coffee so good you won’t want to go out of coffee any more, you’d rather just impress your friends and family with what you’re brewing in your kitchen.

Sound good?

You Need Conical Burrs

The fact of the matter is that while blade grinders are cheap, portable, and easy to find – they make really terrible coffee.  They don’t actually grind the coffee beans, they instead just smash them into smaller bits that you can theoretically use to start brewing.

Don’t do this.  Get a conical burr grinder – it will last for years, perform incredibly, and save you gobs and gobs of cash in the long run.  You like saving money, right?

Find the Right One

• Find a burr grinder that has an automatic safety shut off switch.  When I was younger and not as seasoned in home barista (and commercial barista) techniques, I used to kind of blow this off.  I thought safety shut offs were for people who didn’t know what they were doing.  I was wrong – even the most skilled of baristas will inevitably try to grind whole bean coffee with the bean hopper not properly in place, or the fill compartment not even placed in the grinder.  This will result in such a terrible mess that I am inclined to say if a grinder does not have an auto-shut off switch it really isn’t worth your money.  You will eventually try to grind without everything in place, and that safety switch will save you from cleaning up a huge mess.
• Find a burr grinder that has the exact adjustments to meet your needs.  Some of the less expensive coffee grinders have fewer adjustments – which makes the grinder much simpler to use, but in exchange offers you less flexibility in calibrating your grind how you would like it.  This isn’t a bad thing – it’s just a trade off.  Do you want more flexibility or do you want to keep things simple?  The more grind adjustments that you have, the more time you will have to take to find the right spot for what you’re making.  It may take a few tries with a higher end conical burr grinder that has forty or more adjustments, but once you find the ‘sweet spot’ you’ve got a serious advantage.  You will be grinding perfectly for your particular drink and will have a distinct edge over other people (and their grinders).

Other than that – it really just comes down to personal preference.  I could ramble all day about different factors that I like and others that I find irrelevant, but that sort of thing is quite subjective.  Make sure that you find a grinder with a good safety switch and adjustment settings that meet your needs.  Other than that, it is up to you.

Happy brewing!