FoodBanter.com - View Single Post - Uh oh!! Grinder takes more coffee to make a decent cup!

dsi1[_12_]

On 10/29/2011 2:01 AM, wrote:
> On Saturday, October 29, 2011 3:46:15 AM UTC-4, dsi1 wrote:
>> On 10/27/2011 4:15 PM, John Kuthe wrote:
>>> Just made my third pot of coffee since buying a grinder. Finest grind
>>> yielded too much bitterness, so I dialed it back to 2/3 finest and
>>> went from 3/4 cup of beans to 1 full cup, and it's great! But that's
>>> almost 33% more coffee per pot!!
>>>
>>> Good thing I'm a working man again! :-)
>>>
>>> Might try my coffee slicer again and see if the grinder is worth it to
>>> me.
>>>
>>> John Kuthe...
>>>
>>
>> I don't understand the burr grinders myself. It seems like a messy way
>> to grind coffee and the grinding surfaces will collect old coffee
>> grounds. I probably wouldn't be able to taste the old grounds and oils
>> but the idea is icky. The worst would be those machines in supermarkets.
>> I like the high speed sound of the blade grinders myself.
>
> The coffee purists will tell you all about heat and suchlike, but the fact is that nobody but possibly a few experts can tell the difference using the drip process with paper filters and many people prefer the taste of blade-ground drip coffee to burr ground anyway.
>
> If you're doing French Press you can _see_ a difference--the whirligigs don't give an even grind--you get a lot of fines that make it through the press and end up as sediment in your cup.
>
> If you're doing Espresso then it's the difference between having coffee and not having coffee--the fines from the whirligig clog the portafilter and nothing comes out.
>

Come to think of it, if one uses a French press, a burr grinder would
probably be preferable. I used paper filters so it didn't matter much
about coffee particle size. My grind came up consistently fine anyway.