Coffee Grinders

You can easily buy ground coffee in the supermarkets. However, you will in many cases find that the ground coffee you buy for your French Press is actually ground too finely. Unfortunately, this will greatly affect the taste of your coffee.

If you still brew your coffee yourself (with a French Press, espresso maker, or a coffee machine, for example), we definitely recommend that you invest in a coffee grinder. It doesn’t have to be an expensive one – even one of the smaller, hand-held ones that can be bought for £20–30, can significantly improve your coffee experience compared to ready-bought ground coffee. Essentially, using a coffee grinder is the thing that will enhance your morning coffee the most.

Yes! The small, hand-held grinders are actually not grinders as such, as they use a blade to cut the beans into pieces. The large grinders on the other hand, use a conical burr which grinds the beans. Basically, the larger and more expensive grinders are often better, as they typically come with several different settings for how fine or coarse the beans can be ground.

The small grinders, on the other hand, are a lot cheaper and can, in many cases, still handle the task quite well – unless you are a proper coffee enthusiast. As mentioned before, your choice also depends on what types of coffee you brew. You can grind beans roughly on a hand grinder, but it can be more difficult, as you have to judge when to turn off the grinder when you think the beans are finished grinding.

For better or worse: Yes, it is.

Without being too scientific, what happens is that the flavours are bound to oils in the coffee bean. As soon as the beans are ground and exposed to oxygen and air, they begin to lose flavour nuances, and over time, the oils begin to taste rancid. You can therefore clearly taste the difference when you compare freshly ground beans to a bag of ready-ground coffee bought from the supermarket. For a trained coffee drinker, it can actually be only a matter of minutes after grinding before the coffee begins to lose its flavour nuances.

It may sound a little overwhelming when we put it like that, but once you start drinking freshly ground coffee, it quickly becomes difficult to go back.