COFFEE AWARENESS MONTH, DAY 9: This is Not a Grinder

The most important piece of coffee brewing equipment is not a coffeemaker — it’s a grinder. Grinders are what allow our delicious coffee beans to be crushed into brewable pieces, and the resulting flavors of your brew will be directly related to the quality of your grinder.

Please, hear us on this: A “coffee grinder” with blades, like the one pictured above, is not a grinder at all. Rather, it’s a chopper. A cheap food processor not unlike those sold for the low price of $9.99 — but wait, there’s more! — on many an infomercial. What you want in your house is a burr grinder, so named because a pair of burrs spin ‘round, shoving the coffee through their teeth and resulting in (ideally) a uniform shape for the coffee bits at the other end.

If you’re serious about your coffee obsession, choose Baratza; this company makes the best home grinders on the market (starting at about $150), and will happily send replacement parts (and instructions on repair) should something happen to your investment. Cheaper still is the Capresso Infinity, which we had in our house for a while and did an above-average job for an $85 grinder. Starting around $55, Krups is the cheapest that we can recommend, though the $30 extra you’d spend on the Capresso is well worth it in terms of uniform grind size.

But please: Before you spend another dime on a different coffee brewer or some other wonky kitchen device that’ll eventually gather dust in your cabinet, invest the money to buy a decent coffee grinder. You’ll taste the difference instantly.