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events, grinder, coffee

Part One: The Evolution of Coffee Grinders

Ryan Spaccavento March 08, 2016

When I started out making coffee in 2012, I was presented with a number of different pieces of equipment to learn. As my knowledge continues to grow within the coffee industry, I’m taken back to the grinder.

Over the years I’ve worked on many different types of grinder, each  a little more advanced than its predecessor. A quick glance at where grinders have come from:

In their simplest form there’s the deli grinder. Have you ever had your coffee ground at a local deli? The delicatessen would throw whole beans in the top of the grinder, they would pass through the blades, and ground coffee would spit out of the bottom.

In cafes, this style of grinder still exists, though they're far more advanced. The next variety, the kind with the upright hopper (the chamber in which the coffee beans can be seen), is the most common. These exist in both manual dosing and electronic variety—those that are digitally controlled and dosed based on a time variable.

I’ve written about this before in previous blogs, however I can’t stress the importance of grinding fresh for each cup. When I started Coffee On Cue we had two types of grinders: the BNZ Conical Burr grinder (manual) and the Mazzer Kony E Conical Burr grinder (the E symbolises Electronic).

When you think about the sounds in a cafe, one of them is of repetitive tapping on the grinder. This ‘clickety clickety’ sound is the dosing mechanism that’s pulled like a trigger toward the barista to dose the grounds for each cup of coffee. In my opinion, manual dosing is all in the past, and I’ll tell you why.

Coffee in itself and the attitudes that govern its serving have grown in leaps and bounds in the last decade, particularly with the emergence of specialty or third wave coffee. For the uninitiated, the third wave of coffee refers to the movement for coffee to be treated not as a regular commodity, but instead as a specialist foodstuff, much the same as wine.

Conclusion:

While manual dosing grinders are still the most common choice in cafes (in part because of the reduced cost and in part because many cafes are dragging their feet in considering coffee an artisanal commodity), I foresee them slowly but surely being phased out. It’s worth acknowledging the fantastic work that some baristas can do on a manual dose grinder, and it’s a credit to their skill that they can produce quality coffee given the tools they’re working with. Looking down the line, my prediction is that we’ll be seeing many more electronic grinders in cafes as the third wave of coffee gains even more momentum. The end result will be a more consistently well extracted cup of coffee in your hands every day!

 

Tagged: events, grinder, coffee

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