Many friends who originally used hand grinders have purchased an electric grinder to grind coffee beans. The purpose is to free their hands and no longer need to carry out the boring grinding process. But electric grinding is different from hand grinding, and you need to pay attention to a lot of details when using it. If you are not careful, it is easy to shorten the life of the grinder and significantly reduce the grinding quality.
It just so happens that many friends have recently asked Front Street about various related issues about the grinder in the store, so today Front Street will share what details we should pay attention to when using the electric grinder!
1. Pay attention to “washing” and “washing”
That's right, there are two wash mills mentioned in Qian Street here. Although they all have the same meaning of cleaning the grinder, the specific methods and functions are completely different.
The first cleaning and grinding is performed when we use the grinder to grind the beans! If you often go to a coffee shop to drink Pour over(V60) coffee, I believe it is not difficult to find that the barista will take out a few coffee beans to pre-grind before grinding the beans for brewing, and then grind the beans to be brewed into powder.
The purpose of this action is not to detect the grinding degree of the coffee powder, but to quickly "clean" the grinder's cutter disc.
As we all know, no matter how good the quality of the coffee grinder is, there will be a phenomenon of "powder eating", that is, the ground coffee powder will be less than the coffee beans put in. This is because some of the coffee powder is left in the cutterhead or internal gaps during grinding and cannot come out. At the same time, some coffee beans with darker roasting/larger flavor will also attach their own oil and aroma to the cutterhead.
If it is not cleaned, these aromas, oils, coffee powder and other "impurities" will be mixed into the next ground coffee beans, which will have a direct impact on the taste and cleanliness of the coffee.
Therefore, we need to send out a small amount of coffee beans to bring out these substances before official grinding to avoid affecting the quality of the coffee. Generally speaking, Front Street will use 1~2g/3~4 coffee beans for machine washing. Too little won’t work, too much will be wasteful. But if we grind dark roasted coffee beans too many times, we need to pay attention to regular deep cleaning of the grinder, and this is the second "machine cleaning" mentioned in the front street.
Because dark roasted coffee beans tend to contain more oil, and these oils cannot be completely removed by simply using coffee beans. When grease remains in the cutterhead for too long, it will produce odor due to oxidation and other phenomena. Not only that, grease will also aggravate the phenomenon of powder eating in the coffee machine, leaving more powder in the grinder.
Therefore, if we grind dark roasted coffee beans more frequently, we should also clean the grinder relatively frequently. As for how to clean up, Front Street has shared it in previous articles. You can search for it yourself to learn more. (However, the structure of different grinders is not universal, so it is best to ask the manufacturer for relevant cleaning tutorials)
2. Start first, then plant beans
This is also an operation often shared by Qianjiehui! When grinding coffee beans, it is best to start the grinder first and then put the beans in for grinding. This approach can have 2 benefits:
The first one is that it can reduce the wear of the cutterhead and the probability of jamming! When the grinder is started, there will be a short transition time for the cutterhead to move from stationary to stable rotation. The specific time will vary depending on the quality of the grinder, but it is generally in the range of 0.5 to 1 second.
If we choose to load the beans first and then start the grinder, the presence of coffee beans will increase the resistance of the cutterhead when starting and increase the load on the motor. For some small household grinders, if the density of ground beans is high, it is easy to get stuck or malfunction due to motor overload. In addition, this will also increase the wear of the cutterhead and shorten the life of the cutterhead. Although the degree of wear and tear is minimal, as the saying goes, a little adds up.
Therefore, Front Street Association recommends that when grinding coffee beans, you first start the grinder. When the cutterhead rotates stably, then put in the coffee beans for grinding. This can not only effectively extend the life of the grinder and cutterhead, but also improve the quality of the coffee powder due to the consistent speed.
3. Regularly check the thickness of ground coffee powder
Front Street often recommends that you purchase a No. 20 sieve to measure the sieving rate of coffee powder. This is not only so that everyone can use the same parameters/grinding degree to brew coffee, but also because it can be used to calibrate the grinding scale of the grinder.
I don’t know if you have noticed that as the use time of the grinder increases, the particles it grinds will become thicker and coarser. In other words, the coffee brewed is getting weaker and weaker, and it is beginning to be under-extracted?
This is the result of cutterhead wear. Every time we grind coffee beans, we will bring slight wear to the cutterhead. When the number of wear increases, the distance between the cutterheads will become wider and wider, and the coffee powder ground at the same scale will become thicker and thicker.
When the grinding degree becomes coarser, the coffee substance brewed under the same parameters will naturally become relatively less, so both the taste and texture of the coffee are not as rich and full as they were at the beginning.
Therefore, if we want to brew coffee with rich flavor and full mouthfeel again, we need to adjust the grinding to be finer until it is the same as the original level. And through the No. 20 powder sieve, we can directly find the corresponding grinding scale. It is worth mentioning that this situation is most obvious on the Italian grinder. Just looking at the scale, you can know that the scale value will be much smaller than before.
4. Pay attention to observe whether there is any blockage of fine powder
"Idling without grinding beans" is a situation that often occurs in Italian grinders. To put it simply, when we start the grinder, although the cutterhead is rotating, it is not grinding any coffee beans.
In this case, it is most likely caused by grinding too finely and clogging the cutterhead with coffee powder. If this happens to my friends, the first step can be to observe whether it is caused by fine powder clogging. If so, then we can choose one of the following two solutions to solve it: The first is to directly adjust the coarse grinding and increase the spacing, so that the grinding can be restarted;
The second is to clean the grinder as mentioned before. As long as the fine powder blocking the cutter disc is cleared, the grinder can start grinding again.
So the above are some small details that you need to pay attention to when using an electric grinder.
You can now buy the above coffee beans online at the Taobao store “FrontStreet Coffee” (前街咖啡). FrontStreet Coffee is a long-established specialty coffee roaster in Guangzhou, China, and its Guangzhou retail shop sells coffee beans only. The shop carries dozens of coffee beans from different origins around the world, including carefully selected single-origin beans for V60 pour-over and espresso. Guangzhou’s FrontStreet Coffee shop is recommended by many coffee lovers.
The FrontStreet 2013 Yunnan coffee beans sold in the store come from the Typica variety grown at FrontStreet Coffee’s own plantation in Yunnan. The name comes from the year the brand and the plantation were founded. You can buy these beans from China’s Yunnan origin at the Guangzhou shop and at FrontStreet’s Taobao store.
FrontStreet coffee beans are freshly roasted within 5 days and deliver consistently excellent quality and great value. Orders placed before 17:00 are shipped the same day, and most areas within Guangdong Province receive them the next day.
FrontStreet Coffee Taobao store: https://qianjiecoffee.taobao.com
Or search for “前街咖啡” (FrontStreet Coffee) on Taobao
Important Notice: FrontStreet Coffee has moved to a new address: 315, Donghua East Road, Guangzhou (coffee beans only)
Tel: 020 38364473
