I’m often asked what gadget one should buy to make better coffee at home, and I always give the same answer: get a good grinder. Then I wait for the blank response.
The reaction is understandable. A good grinder is an expensive, bulky appliance with less sex appeal than a blender — praising one is like bringing up renter’s insurance, or which antihistamine to take this spring. Solid advice, but not exactly a sentiment that stirs one’s passions. No matter: get a good grinder, which is to say, get a burr grinder, which will improve the quality of the coffee you drink at home more than any other single piece of equipment. As a rule, you will make better coffee with a good grinder and a cheap coffee setup than with a cheap grinder and the most sophisticated coffee maker on the market.
Why? Because a good burr grinder serves a vital function. It grinds evenly.
Which is one of the fundamentals of better extraction, and better coffee. Use an inexpensive blade grinder and some of the beans will be chopped into coarse chunks (which won’t give up all of their flavors), some into fine powder (which will give up too much, including bitter notes). Brew that mess on a Chemex and you’ll get underdeveloped and overdeveloped flavors, the raw and the overcooked. Use a burr grinder and all of the beans will be evenly milled, crushed into particles by rotating burrs until reduced to the size you set. The better the grinder, the more uniform the grounds, the more even the extraction, and the better the brew.
Unfortunately, a good burr grinder starts at around $100. It’s a high barrier to entry for most, but even if it’s expensive, it’s worth it. You’re paying for the burr set (the flanged metal cones and/or plates that crush the beans) and the motor, and if you buy a quality machine it should last for years, a one-time investment.
Last month, Baratza introduced the Encore, a new entry-level model from a company that is to coffee grinders what Wüsthof is to kitchen knives: solid, understated, durable. (Baratza has a solid track record, and there’s a reason why its grinders are carried by many of the more conscientious independent coffee shops.) The Encore costs more than the Maestro Plus, the model it resembles and replaces (Baratza sells it for $149, though others offer it for $129), but even if the outward appearance of the Encore is unremarkable, there are some changes under the hood.
Most notably, there’s a new gearbox and drive shaft. I asked Baratza’s Pierce Jens to explain the mechanics. “Now the drive shaft for the burr sticks all the way down and has its own oil-impregnated bushing on the motor plate. This means we know exactly where the helical motor worm shaft is, and exactly where the burr drive shaft is. So, we can set the gear meshing ratio to the optimal level to prevent gear stripping or excess wear,” Jens replied in an e-mail. “How good is the new gearbox? We have gone back to a nylon gear as it is much quieter, and with the proper relationship the motor does not shear teeth from the gear.”
Got that? If not, it doesn’t matter: just using a burr grinder will bring up your coffee game. In fact, simply grinding right before brewing will make a tremendous improvement. Once coffee hits the burrs you’re in a race against time — the exposure to oxygen has an immediate impact and starts degrading the coffee right away — which makes using the grinder at the supermarket or coffee shop one of the worst things you could do if you care about flavor. You sacrifice taste for convenience.
Remember, flavor has physical properties, and the nuanced layers that make the best coffees so mesmerizing are actually found inside those beans. Coffee from a cheap grinder or pulverized at the store last week won’t hurt anybody, but it also won’t realize the potential of the well-sourced, well-roasted beans that you sought out so carefully. The point of all of this attentiveness (to sound appreciative), or obsessiveness (to sound glib), or hand-wringing (to sound dismissive) is to have access those delicate flavors. To get at them you first need to get to them.
You need to get a good grinder.