Grinding coffee almost as much fun as drinking it

Grinding coffee, almost as much fun as drinking it

As we’ve discussed in previous columns, there are a number of factors and steps that go into making a superior cup of coffee. One that often seems to get marginalized is the importance of the grind in coffee preparation. I blame this on the wide acceptance of preground and canned grocery store coffee. Most of us were practically raised on the notion that it is perfectly natural for coffee to come to us in a preground and packaged state. Until the popular resurgence of the neighborhood coffee shop in the national consciousness in the mid to late 1980s I’d wager that many people barely knew what actual coffee cherries even looked like. The idea of grinding one’s coffee from whole beans at home conjured images of those old hand-cranked, wooden coffee grinders, the type used by pioneers in covered wagons or mess cooks during the Civil War.

Today, it is fairly well accepted that grinding fresh coffee immediately before brewing produces a much more flavorful cup than using preground coffee. The reasons for this are rather straightforward. As with almost all food products coffee is subject to the effects of oxidation. Like cheese, bread, beer or wine, once coffee beans are exposed to the air (and they always are, in spite of how they may be packaged) they begin to oxidize and stale immediately. The oils within the seeds contain most of the good stuff that produce aroma and flavor, and when those seeds have been ground more surface area is exposed and the coffee stales even faster. With quality coffee you may taste a difference between a drink using freshly ground beans and the same coffee using beans ground an hour or less prior to brewing.

If you drink coffee in the form of espresso grinding immediately before brewing is absolutely essential. The difference in taste between espresso made with ground-to-order coffee and espresso that has been made with stale grounds is quite noticeable.

Here’s your homework assignment for the week: go to your favorite coffee shop (we’ll assume that they do everything correctly, from using good arabica coffee to tamping and pulling the shot properly) and ask them to pull you a shot into a demitasse cup with freshly ground coffee. Enjoy that shot within the first few minutes, read your Herald Times Reporter for a little while, and then ask them to pull another shot with ground coffee that has been sitting around for some time (most shops keep a container of ground coffee from the day’s grinding for use in cold espresso drinks; ask them to use that preground coffee). The difference in taste between the two drinks should be obvious, while the only difference in their preparation is the time from grind to cup.

There are basically three methods of grinding coffee available to most people: crushing, chopping or burr grinding. There is a fourth method known as roller grinding but this employs large, expensive machines and is used primarily by the big commercial producers (the preground, canned grocery store coffees).

Crushing, with something like a mortar and pestle can produce a powdery fine coffee that is suitable for preparing Turkish coffee, but most people in the U.S. don’t drink Turkish coffee and it is a bit too labor intensive to be a practical daily method.

Chopping is what a food processor or blender does. It is also the method employed by most of the lower cost home coffee grinders that use a whirling metal blade. The drawback with this method is that the ground coffee particles are widely disparate in size and shape. You want to match the grind to the type of brewing method, and that is much more challenging when the grind produces particles of varying shapes and sizes. This is an acceptable method for grinding your coffee if you are price conscious or not overly concerned with getting optimal results.

You’ll have to read part two next week’s column to get the rest of the exciting story on optimum coffee grinding.