In the last blog, I addressed how important the WATER is that you use to brew your coffee. Now we need to address the second most frequent way people murder their coffee beans.

Many well-meaning enthusiastic coffee lovers kill the goodness locked within the coffee beans with the WRONG type of grinder, one that should never have been designated for coffee.

IMPORTANT COFFEE BREWING TIP #2

Grind coffee with a burr grinder ONLY. Customers who purchase coffee beans by the bag from us have 2 options: we can sell them a bag of whole bean coffee, or we can grind the coffee beans for them. Customers who tell me they have a grinder at home earn themselves a third question: “Is it a blade or a burr grinder?”

Remember how all our life we were LIED TO when we were told that dark roast was “great coffee”? Same goes for ye olde kitchen spice (blade) grinder. At some point, the companies who made them realized they could make tons of money off unsuspecting but well-meaning coffee drinkers who wanted to grind their beans at home, and they started marketing their blade grinders as “coffee grinders”.

Why not grind coffee with a blade, you ask? Because blade grinders result in uneven grinds. Which is TERRIBLE for coffee, which must be evenly ground in order to have a balanced extraction (the process by which the water passes through the ground coffee and produces and “brews” the resulting cup of coffee).

Do yourself a favor, and relegate that spice grinder to your spices.

Should you invest in your own burr grinder instead of asking us to grind the beans for you? Sure! Coffee beans last MUCH longer in their whole bean form (when kept away from oxygen). Once the coffee has been ground, we recommend brewing and consuming the coffee within one to two weeks. As whole beans, roasted coffee can remain fresh for 1, 2, and 3 months, and sometimes even longer.

Which burr grinder do we recommend? We sell the Baratza grinders in our store and their affordable Encore model is the best seller. But it depends on how you brew (you should invest in a more sensitive, higher quality grinder for an espresso machine, for example), your budget, your aesthetic, and so on.

If you aren’t ready to invest in a decent burr grinder, no worries! We will grind your coffee for you. Just make sure to tell us how you brew it, because the grind differs greatly depending on what brew method – espresso, drip, Moka pot, French press, cold brew or Turkish – you use.

If you would prefer to mix it up – using some coffee for French press, and some for pour over, then I recommend getting a burr grinder. Then you control when and how often you grind your beans and the way you will use them, depending on the brew method.

BONUS HOME COFFEE HACK #3:

DON’T REFRIGERATE YOUR COFFEE BEANS!

Never store whole bean or ground coffee in the fridge. The refrigerator can cause condensation inside the bag or container of coffee, which will begin a brewing and degradation process. Coffee beans or ground coffee will be kept freshest when stored in room temp either closed within the foil lined bag it comes in, or inside a vacuum container made for coffee.