Why you should not use a blender to grind your coffee

There are a few basic parameters that are important to understand when it comes to brewing a great cup of coffee. The key ones are water, freshness, proportion, and the most important one grind. When brewing coffee, one of the key things you want to achieve in a controlled extraction and how well the coffee has been ground defines the delicate balance between ration, temperature, and more.

Whereas a blender is used to blend extracted coffee concoctions. While a grinder helps you grind the coffee bean, a blender helps you jazz up your freshly brewed concoction. It’s almost summertime, and a cold glass of iced coffee is enough to woo anyone. If you’re also craving that cafe-style, rich, creamy blend of a cold coffee, and wondering how to replicate that taste and texture, a blender comes to your rescue!

To achieve such a level of complexity, it is important to invest in a burr grinder. Is it impossible to achieve the consistency required to brew the best cup? Here are a few more reasons why you should not use a blender to grind your coffee.

Grind particle distribution:

The blender consists of two blades that will at the most break or chop the roasted beans. It is mainly built to be used as a food processor. Inconsistency in particle size will always be a major issue and your beans will always extract at different rates.

Adjustable Settings:

A good burr grinder will provide you an option to have multiple settings to get different grind sizes for different brews, a blender will never be able to achieve that level of consistency. Adjustable burrs give you an option to make your coffee go finer or coarser which helps determine the recipe for your coffee.

Extraction:

When hot water is introduced to ground coffee it starts extracting all the flavors from the coffee. In a blender, due to the high rpm of the blades, the coffee beans tend to heat up and taste burnt after brewing.

The cons of grinding your coffee in a blender are one too many:

·         It is inconsistent

·         Uncontrollable

·         Coffee brewed using a blender always tastes a little burnt

Ask yourself, have you ever seen your neighborhood cafes using a blender to grind your coffee?

Investing in a burr grinder will enable you to better control your brewing experience. A burr grinder is the most important piece of gear any cafe should own. If you are serious about serving good coffee, make this investment first. A quality burr grinder yields uniformly sized grounds by crushing the beans between the revolving burrs.

Here are some advantages of investing in a good grinder:

1.   Easy access to freshly ground coffee for every cup.

A lot of foods and drinks get stale after some time, and coffee is one of them. This is the process of oxidation. Minute organic molecules break down over a while which creates a loss of flavour. With coffee, the aromatic oils evaporate. These oils are essential and have an impact on the tasting and smelling experiences of coffee. When the coffee beans have been grounded, you have at least 30 minutes to make a fresh brew, but after that, we consider the coffee to be stale. Therefore investing in a good grinder will ensure access to better-tasting brews.

2.   Control over quality and size:

Burr grinders enable you to select grind size basis your brewing method. If your coffee is weak or bitter, the burr grinder allows adjusting size precisely for better extraction. They crush the beans avoiding bits of coffee dust that could ruin your coffee. Burr grinders are built to last.

Pro tip: Grind Size matters.

The key is to monitor and manipulate the size of the coffee grind. When oxygen interacts with the mix, the larger particles take more time to extract, and the smaller ones take way faster.

After brewing and the coffee tastes a little sour, which means that the extraction wasn’t fully finished. To make the extraction faster and make sure not to have that taste again, just make sure to grind the coffee finer.

The secret to a great cup of coffee lies in extraction, and grind size is a key part of it. It’s one of the most important variables to look at when it comes to brewing.

Finer the grounds, mean more coffee surface area is in contact with water leading to higher extraction. Coarser grounds mean less surface area in contact with water and a slower extraction rate. All things considered, weaker tasting coffees can be fixed by grinding finer and bitter coffee can be fixed by grinding coarser.

A Burr grinder can open a new world to you by revealing, enabling you to use a variety of coffee brewers, and empowering you to make small adjustments between brews to improve your coffee.