Sep 03 2008
The burr necessities
I had bought my first grinder to grind my own beans around ten years ago, after a friend had introduced me to the wonders of the French Press (thanks Jackie). It was a whirly blade type that I had bought from a Miejers superstore. Oh boy, did I think I was some hot stuff, grinding my own beans. No more coffee in the can for me, from now on I would drink the whole bean gourmet stuff and nothing else. I scoffed at my peers, telling them that did not know what they were missing, how coffee tasted so much better when you wait until the very last moment to unleash the power from the bean. I figured that I had reached the peak as a coffee connoisseur with my little Mr Coffee whirly gig grinder.
To quote a Zappa song:” How could I be such a fool?”
Now that I have upped my level of coffee consciousness, it has now come to my attention that you standard blade grinder is not the optimal way to prepare your coffee. Sure, it is fine for the regular hoi polloi who do not care about the subtleties of the coffee taste experience. However, if you you consider yourself a true coffee aficionado, only a burr grinder will do. That’s right, a burr grinder. Apparently a burr grinder will give you a much more even grind than a whirly blade grinder will and also cause less damage to essential oils in the coffee bean. A good burr grinder will also allow you to adjust the grind to match you brewer with much greater precision than relying on the counting method.
So suffice it to say, I could not sleep peacefully until I got myself a burr grinder. I did not know how I could of gone so long without one. Imagine, drinking substandard coffee all these years and not even knowing that I was. I immediately began my search. After perusing Sweet Marias website and ebay, I came to the conclusion that a good burr grinder was probably going to cost me a pretty penny. The top line models were going for around two hundred smackers, and I could not find a used one on e-bay that I could get for less than forty. But surely, one cannot put a price tag on better tasting coffee right? Wrong. As much as I needed to get me a new burr grinder, I also had to face the fact that I had bills to pay and groceries to buy. So I went a checked out was was going on on my local Target Superstore and Lo and Behold they had a little Black and Decker burr mill grinder on sale for just twenty five bucks! Sure, it was smaller and much less industrial with fewer buttons and settings than those other ones, but it seemed like a good starter. So I bought it.
Somehow, immediately after I took it out of the box and placed it on my kitchen counter, I managed to snap off two of its little plastic peg legs. However, since this did not seem to affect its stability, I decided not to return just yet. Its little hopper holds an adequate amount of beans and it seems to have enough settings to suit me. It is a rather loud device, but no louder than my old grinder. You also need to keep pressing on the button to finish grinding your beans, but this is only slightly inconvenient for me. The only thing I really do not like about it, is the way the grounds container is made. It is a bit of a pain to try to pull the little plastic receptacle out9especially in the wee hours of the morning) and the grounds tend to stick to the sides of it. But besides that it is a pretty neat little machine and my coffee is tasting a little better. Since the machine only cost 25 bucks, I do not expect to last forever, but hopefully it will do until my budget gets a little bigger.
