Grinding at work
Grinding is an unsolved problem. The goal is to take some oblong-shaped beans and turn them into something that looks consistently like sand, if you’re doing pourover; something that looks consistently like powder, if you’re doing Aeropress or espresso; or something that looks consistently like gravel, if you have given up on life.
The hard word there is consistently. Instead of consistent sand, most grinders will give you a predominance of sand among some powder and some unground bits. This is because the burrs of the grinder sometimes re-grind something that has been already ground, or the burrs wear down inconsistently over time, or the burrs aren’t shaped to fit the right sort of bean.
Beans are shaped differently from estate to estate, and from lot to lot. Some are tiny peaberry beans; others are big chunguses. Your burrs need to not care what beans are being fed into them. Most burrs rather care. And most of them wear down over time.
Coffee is also oily; oil sticks. As a result, your grinder will retain oils, and hence coffee, every time you grind. Cleaning is necessary. The amount of maintenance you need to perform is a major factor of the expense of grinders.
Regardless of where you’re at in coffee, your grinder should cost more than all of the other equipment you’ve purchased for coffee, combined. An entry-level grinder will run you around $100, turn out barely acceptable grinds, and crap out within two years. It is a good way to get started. The next step up is around $300. The one that nerds love, myself included, is around $600. Things, uh, go north from there.
And that is the state of automatic grinders, where you press a button and coffee comes out. In a vast bardo of penny-pinching sadness lies manual grinders. And if you’re spending two months in France, you are not packing a Capresso with you.
Hario makes a manual grinder. It is called the Skerton. It is not great. I have historically recommended the Porlex Mini, a grinder from a brand that makes hand grinders and nothing else.
The Porlex is fine for those who do not understand good grinders. You eyeball the coarseness of your grind, turn the crank for a few minutes, and out comes coffee. The crank handle itself is a little thin, and after a few seconds it starts to dig into the side of your fingers. After a minute or so, you start to feel winded. Grinding is work. You come to appreciate this work, since you normally press a single button and let a robot do all of the work for you.
I’ve used a Porlex for 9 years, and long thought that the category of manual hand grinders didn’t really evolve much. Then I got to thinking about how I’ll have to use a Porlex every day for two months, and I got to researching again. I quickly found this. Despite the Amazon brand-sounding name, the arm folds(!), it looks built well, and it addresses a few of Porlex’s issues:
- Instead of a rubber gasket surrounding the grinder to keep your hand from moving around the grinder as you crank, the whole grinder is made of a textured material.
- The crank is thick, sturdy, and rounded, so it doesn’t dig into your hand.
- The crank has zero resistance when the hopper is empty.
- The parts fit together extremely well, and have been engineered with cleaner tolerances than the Porlex or Hario.
- The grinder fits over 24g of beans, which is enough for 400g of coffee.
- Coarseness is meted out in discrete ticks, rather than on a continuous dial.
The only real downside: it is twice as heavy.
I have used this grinder 9 times on this trip so far, and while it retains a fair amount of coffee over time, it is still fantastic, and now I’m updating my recommendation that you use one of these when traveling. It’s worth the money, bulk, and weight. If you don’t already have a Porlex, you should get it.