By Justin Shepherd, foodcoffeelife.com
Tuesday, January 15th, 2012 9:00 AM CST
OK, here’s the deal. If all you want is “drinkable” coffee, you wouldn’t want to spend the money on a quality grinder. But, if you want to get the most out of those precious beans, you need to make a small investment. Small because, assuming your grinder lasts for five years (and it should), and you drink just one cup of coffee a day (but we’re betting it’s more), you’re adding a cost of less than 8¢ per cup to make your coffee café-quality — and you know how much we charge for that!
A great cup of coffee starts with great beans. And we sell those. But to get the most out of coffee, you need to be grinding it just before brewing, and those coffee grounds need to be of a uniform size. Buy your coffee preground, and you’re guaranteeing a stale cup; use a cheap blade grinder or one off the shelf at Walmart, and you’re going to have random sizes of coffee grounds that won’t extract evenly — leaving you with a mixture of overextracted and underextracted (read: bad) flavors in your cup, instead of a consistent, delicious flavor that you can repeat time after time. Even if you skimp on the coffeemaker
— and you can make great coffee with brewing devices that cost less than $20 — you shouldn’t skimp on the grinder. It’s the most important piece of the process, aside from the beans themselves.
Want to know more about buying and brewing great coffee? It’s cheaper, and easier, than you think. Just ask Spencer’s owner Justin Shepherd how to make coffee the frugal way. No reason you can’t have high quality coffee and continue brewing fabulous coffee at home.
