Three tips for choosing your coffee grinder

This is Not a purchase guide or review, just want to share some thoughts about coffee grinder, from my point of view.

1. Before you do anything, set a budget range first.

Take your income situation and expenses into consideration, and set a budget that you feel comfortable with, then you can start looking on the grinders within your budget. You get what you pay for, but spend over budget is not a good habit.

2. Hand grinder or electric grinder?

If you are a person who like getting up very early to make coffee while your whole family is still sleeping / like to make coffee in different places / don't like spending too much time to clean your grinder, then hand grinder fits you pretty well. My personal experience is at the same price range, hand grinders usually have better performance compare to electric grinders because hand grinders don't have the cost on motor and other electronic components, they can spend more money on the burr design and quality. However, we can't always keep at the same speed when we are using hand grinder, and that does affect the grinding consistency. Personally speaking, I prefer electric grinders.

3. Conical burr or flat burr?

If you already decided to get a hand grinder, you basically don't have choice since most of the hand grinders are using conical burr. Good grinders produce more consistency grind, no matter which burr it is, but both two burr has their own "style". Coffee ground produced by flat burr is thinner, more like a "piece"; while coffee ground produced by conical burr is more like a "polyhedron". My personal experience is coffee from flat burr is more clean, emphasize both good taste and bad taste; coffee from conical burr has more flavour complexity. Personally speaking, I prefer flat burr. In the second picture, you can see coffee ground from flat burr and conical burr, if you can see which one comes from which burr, you are good at this.

Thanks for reading.