After my Cuisinart Grind and Brew coffee maker proved to be impossible to clean, I decided to grind coffee separately. The Cuisinart Supreme Grind Automatic Burr Mill sells for $49.99 in specialty stores, but I bought mine at Costco for $29.99. It’s far from perfect, but for the price it’s a good grinder.
Tips for better grinding:
The settings are not laws, they are suggestions. It’s your coffee, so brew it the way you like it. After some experimenting, I found that grinding the coffee two notches finer than the manufacturer recommended, and setting the quantity to fewer cups than I was brewing worked best.
Storing coffee in the refrigerator preserves the delicate flavor, but room-temperature beans grind better than cold beans. Filling the bean holder in the evening gives them time to come to room temperature.
Product Features and comments:
Burr grinding provides uniform grind and optimum flavor (Burr grinding is better than blade grinding, as explained below.)
Elegant stainless steel styling (Yes, it’s shiny black and stainless steel colored plastic.)
18-position grind selector – from ultra-fine to extra-coarse (You change the grind by rotating the container, which means it’s easy to accidentally change the setting if you bump or move the grinder. At the finest setting, it’s still not fine enough for espresso.)
4 to 18-cup slide dial controls (This is also easy to change accidentally.)
Removable 8 oz. bean hopper
Removable collection box holds enough ground coffee for 32 cups (A safety interlock prevents the grinder from operating unless this box is in place.)
Separate one-touch power bar (This was a bad idea. The one-touch power bar is almost invisible, and it’s easy to accidentally touch it because it is right where you naturally touch the grinder when you remove the container of ground coffee.)
Electric timer automatically shuts off unit when grind cycle is complete
Heavy-duty motor (I have no clue what they mean, because coffee is not hard to grind.)
Convenient cord storage (The excess cord winds around pegs under the base.)
Blade Grinders: Most inexpensive grinders use a spinning metal blade to chop up the beans. You control the grind by controlling the length of time the blade spins. This doesn’t produce a uniform particle size and if you run a blade grinder long enough to produce extremely fine particles for expresso or Turkish coffee you also heat the coffee from the friction of the blade. This can cause a burnt flavor.
Burr Grinders Burr grinders crush coffee beans between a moving and a non-moving part. One or both of the grinding surfaces has a pattern or bumps (the burr part) that force the beans against the other surface. The distance between the surfaces controls the particle size, and when a particle is small enough, it falls or is guided out of the grinding area. Burr grinders are subdivided into wheel and conical grinders. Conical burrs are supposedly better than wheels.
Flaws in the grinder?
I did not experience this personally, but I found some complaints that the grinder clogs if you grind dark-roasted coffee. Dark-roasted beans are oily, and the ground coffee cakes inside the exit chute.
The 8-ounce hopper is convenient if you always drink the same coffee. However, changing the bean type is not easy. To get all the beans out, you have to turn the grinder upside down and shake it, or grind the beans until the hopper and the grinder is empty.
