A Manual Coffee Grinder

Greetings in 2019! I hope you’ve enjoyed some down time and were able to reflect on 2018 and are ready for 2019.

For this past Christmas, I gave my husband this portable, manual coffee grinder from JavaPresse. We already have an electric burr grinder, which we’ve had for years. But like the path that led to pour-over equipment, internet-stumbling led to this purchase. The article I linked to about how to make a good pour-over was written by a company that designed a manual grinder. I wasn’t even considering a manual grinder, but started to read reviews about that one and different ones, then … SOLD!

We both really like this little grinder, and without any rigorous comparison testing, we thought it made a better cup than our electric grinder. (There could be many reasons for that …). This isn’t the gadget you want to brew a pot of coffee for your party of eight people though. This is good for grinding one or two cups. It takes about one and a half minutes to grind the beans for a cup. My husband seems to always walk around as he cranks the grinder.

I like that it’s mechanical and simple. No electricity required. No loud noise, just a pleasant human-speed grinding sound, kind of like a pepper mill. You can take the entire thing apart. I like the resistance of the beans as they’re turning in the grinder, and that clearly eases up when the beans are all ground.

On the subject of grinding, I recently read an interesting article, Is Pre-ground coffee ever better than freshly ground? I had never considered this: “When you don’t have a quality grinder, it may be better to use pre-ground coffee. Your local roaster or coffee shop may have a high-quality grinder. … If you buy in small amounts and store the pre-ground coffee well, you could get a better cup of coffee than if you had ground the beans yourself.” That’s because, “With inconsistently ground coffee, some particles will extract more quickly than others and you could get a muddy or over-extracted cup.”

Hmmm. I think that’s why I was interested in trying out the small, modestly-priced, manual grinder. There are other brands which look similar to ours and are cheaper. If you don’t have a good grinder, you might want to do your own internet research …