Introduction to coffee knowledge and understanding of bean grinder

With the domestic expansion of Starbucks, COSTA and other fast-vanishing coffee chains. Let more and more Chinese people slowly change the imported drink of coffee from fashion consumption to living habits. Driven by a small number of domestic boutique coffee shops and roasters. More and more coffee drinkers are beginning to find out. It turns out that the products of fast consumer stores such as Starbucks and COSTA can only be called rubbish in boutique coffee.

I believe that the products made by many friends with toy pump coffee machines like Cankun or Delong and Italian coffee powder can taste much better than Starbucks. Some friends may not be convinced! But this is an indisputable fact! Starbucks and COSTA coffee is a simple milk coffee without talking about ESPRESSO, and you can't imagine how it can be imported without syrup. Bitter, astringent, scorched taste. But in this world, there are still many Chinese people who think that there is no coffee without bitterness. In fact, high-quality coffee should be sour and sweet, in which with different beans, different roasting degrees will have the flavor of flowers, fruit, honey, nuts, chocolate and so on. All right, back to the bean grinder!

The importance of coffee grinder:

Bean grinders are often directly ignored in coffee recruits! This is a really sad fact! Many novices buy coffee powder directly in the supermarket. But friends with a little common sense will know that the shelf life of coffee after roasting is very short. It is generally recommended that freshly baked beans should be drunk within 1 month! Because in a month's time, the elements in the beans that can bring you the ultimate flavor will be quickly lost. Coffee ground into powder oxidizes faster because of its larger contact area with air. Generally speaking, 15 minutes after grinding is enough to turn the original boutique coffee into waste. That's why some people or merchants always advertise that our coffee is freshly ground coffee! Although sometimes those merchants themselves do not understand why they want to grind!

Some friends here will say, as long as it is not grinding right now!? I bought a few dozen yuan of spiral bean grinder on Taobao and now I can OK it. In fact, as long as your beans are good enough and fresh enough, it must be much better than buying coffee powder directly to brew and extract! But you still waste coffee beans! A spiral bean chopper (we call it a bean chopper because this machine crushes beans by chopping rather than grinding) not only can't process coffee beans into uniform coffee powder, but also generates a lot of heat in the process of chopping. Coffee powder accelerates the oxidation process when heated. The flavor will also be taken away! In addition, under the first principle of successful extraction of boutique coffee (uniform extraction), because the coffee powder particles chopped by the chopping machine are coarse and fine, it will also lead to the failure of coffee extraction! The most direct is excessive extraction, or insufficient extraction! The coffee with insufficient extraction will be sour and astringent, and the coffee with excessive extraction will be too bitter!

If you don't understand, a simple example is fried sour and spicy shredded potatoes. If some of the shredded potatoes you cut are thick and thin, then you will find that the thick ones are still raw when you stir-fry the fine ones and put them into the pan. But if you stir-fry the coarse ones, the fine ones will be fried into mashed potatoes! So a good bean grinder is the first product for good baristas in the field of boutique coffee, rather than coffee machines or other extraction tools! This is why the price of bean grinders with excellent performance can be tens of thousands of reasons!

Type of bean grinder:

Bean grinders are generally classified by coffee extraction, which are divided into two categories: single coffee grinder and Italian coffee grinder! According to the structure of the grinding plate can be divided into flat knife, cone knife, ghost teeth three categories! You can break up manpower and electric power according to the way you work. But no matter what category, my personal advice is to buy the best bean grinder that you can afford!

Ghost tooth grinding plate suitable for single coffee

Cone knife grinder

An omnipotent flat cutter head

Ghost tooth bean grinder

Generally speaking, the bean grinder of the ghost tooth grinder is only suitable for grinding single coffee, that is, coffee powder with thicker particles. This kind of bean grinder is represented by Japan's Fuji R220 and Taiwan's Yang family's Pegasus 207N, while the high-end ones are American grinder 875 and Fuji R440. Compared with flat knife or cone knife, this kind of grinding plate has an excellent sense of balance and thickness in terms of extraction flavor, but the details are not as accurate as flat knife. (to put it simply, it is like the difference between the gallbladder machine and the stone machine in the stereo.) it is often the first choice for ordinary coffee lovers to make a single bean grinder! The performance of the two bean grinders I recommend below are basically the same! But the price of Fuji is about three times that of Pegasus. However, Fuji is small in size and fine in workmanship, so it is more suitable for a corner of the home. Pegasus is a rough undertaking, living a silly rough, but this image does not affect its good grinding products.

Japanese Fuji R220 single product coffee bean grinder

Taiwan Pegasus bean grinder

Taiwan Pegasus 207N Ghost Tooth Bean Grinder Taobao search

Flat knife bean grinder

As for flat Dao, it has the largest quantity on the market. Whether it is a single bean grinder or an Italian bean grinder. Whether it is the top commercial German Mehdi EK43 or the mid-range MAZZER MAJOR, or the Eureka MMG designed for home use. Flat knife grinder generally has a clear positioning, either the Italian brand MAZZER as the representative of the pure Italian grinder, or the German brand Mahdi as a single product grinder with table (some models can also be compatible with Italian coffee). Because of the difference in knife pattern design and adjustment design, most Italian brand Italian coffee grinders can only grind the fine powder suitable for Italian coffee, but not for the coarse powder of single coffee! In the field of flat knife, the quality of the product is directly proportional to the grade of the bean grinder and the diameter of the grinding plate. So much so that there is a famous saying in the coffee industry: the diameter of the grinding disc of the flat knife is the truth!

Eureka Mignon MMG specially designed for home users

MAZZER MAJOR E program-controlled quantitative bean grinder designed for middle-end commercial users and high-end enthusiasts

Mehdi Mahlkonig ek43 bean grinder designed for top commercial customers and ultimate enthusiasts (this model is compatible with Italian and single products)

Cone knife bean grinder

As for the conical knife, this is also ten thousand jin of oil. Except for the top MAZZER ROBUR, most other products are compatible with Italian and individual products. However, there is a serious differentiation between the two levels in the world of conical knives, either tens of thousands of top Italian bean grinders or low-end entry-level products! Household entry-level products are represented by BARATZA ENCORE, and most household-grade cones are compatible with individual products and Italian style. However, the quality of the product is of different opinions. Because the cone knife has high efficiency and fast grinding speed, a good cone knife will have the right amount of fine powder in the product can significantly improve the hierarchical sense of coffee, so the standard bean grinder in many top cafes will choose it. However, some people will feel that fine powder leads to miscellaneous smell in coffee extraction and restrains the cone knife. As for how to choose, you really have to try this for yourself to understand! After all, what suits your taste is the best! Taper cutters are also favored by most manual bean grinders because of their high grinding efficiency. HARIO 2TB grinder Lido is designed with taper knives.

Grind beans with Chinese BARATZA ENCORE cone knife

Italian mazzer robur E program-controlled quantitative bean grinder

Hario MSCS-2TB hand bean grinder

Electric control and ordinary component bean grinder

In Italian mills, program-controlled quantitative bean grinders have become popular in recent years. This product is a design that appeared in recent years. Because the traditional component design is suitable for coffee shops with large flow, shops with insufficient flow grind the powder into powder buckets for a long time, which is extremely wasteful. Even if you don't grind it at ordinary times and the guests order it again, the cleaning of the powder bucket every day is still a headache. At the beginning, the efficiency of the Italian bean grinder is not high, and the grinding speed is slow, so the bean grinder of the component type will be ground well when it is free, and will be used directly when in use. However, with the development of technology, the grinding efficiency of the new high-grade bean grinder has been significantly improved, and it takes less than 3 seconds for the high-grade ROBUR to grind 20g powder. In order to facilitate cleaning, but also easier to control quality control, but also more economical, so the emergence of the current electronically controlled straight-out bean grinder.

How to choose a bean grinder:

Choosing a bean grinder is really a technical job, because there are too many kinds, too many grades, and the price difference is huge! But remember one truth, the world of coffee is always a penny! Cheap without good goods! My personal advice is to set your own budget first! Whether it is a single product or Italian style, it is more appropriate to buy a bean grinder at the same price as the coffee machine or single product extraction design.

If it is to play with the hand in the office, you can enter a HARIO 2TB, if the hand mill has some product quality requirements, you can enter a LIDO2. If you drink a single item and care about the price, Taiwan's M520 or Little Eagle is not bad. If it is for home use, if you want to be compatible, the cheaper one is ENCORE, and the more expensive one is VARIO. But my personal advice is... It's better not to be compatible! Unless you spend more than 2W on EK43!

As for whether it is an electronic direct output or a traditional component, for one or two cups a day, the ordinary version of the bean grinder for each cup is also enough. For users who pursue more than one or two cups of product quality per day, it is better to choose the electric control straight out. In addition, the single bean grinder generally has no electronic control design. In addition, my personal opinion is that if you can buy electricity, you should never buy a manual one! Electricity is not only labor-saving, but also has a congenital advantage in the uniformity of production! As for the Italian style grinding flat or cone, believe me, if you are not a high-level enthusiast, it is difficult to drink the difference.

My bean grinder:

With so much talk, many people on duty will certainly ask the owner what kind of bean grinder he uses. I have been drinking coffee for almost 20 years, and I am a coffee enthusiast with ashes. From hand mill to electric mill, I have played more than 50 bean grinders. Of course I've suffered a loss and been in a pit! Of course, I finally found my favorite bean grinder. It's just that the cost is huge, so ordinary coffee lovers are not recommended for reference. Except for ashes! The list of my existing bean grinders is as follows:

Italian style: MAZZER MAJOR, Mahdi K30, NOUVA MYTHOS ONE

Item: grind Master 875, Mahdi EK43

Among them, MAJOR and K30 and GM875 are used in the office, and EK43 and MYTHOS ONE are used at home. Finally, take two family photos! Because all the equipment was moved to the studio warehouse before moving, please ignore the broken table for the whole family. Or look directly at the following family photo at home!

The family photo of the studio bean grinder, the result of the defeat.

Bean grinder at home