Did you know that keeping your coffee grinder clean can change the quality of your favorite morning brew?
There's something you already know about this brew that you might not really think about: coffee is organic. In other words, its beverage is derived from living matter. Like other organic products, it's perishable and degrades when exposed to air and heat. What does this mean for the residue left behind in the coffee grinder?
The longer ground coffee is left in the grinder, the more heat and oxygen it's exposed to, and the more heat and oxygen it's exposed to, the more the ground coffee will degrade. The degradation of these ground beans means your beverage will taste worse than freshly ground coffee.
If you leave the ground beans in the coffee grinder, you'll never be truly sure you're getting freshly ground beans because most grinders recirculate their contents. That means if you really want freshly ground beans, you should clean your coffee grinder occasionally.
Regularly cleaning your grinder will not only maintain its flavor but also ensure you get the desired particle size. Most grinders can be adjusted to fine or coarse grinds. If you don't clean it, you'll end up with more and more smaller particles than you want.
The problem with superfine particles is that they're more susceptible to oxygen and heat. This means they'll degrade more quickly. Over time, you'll develop a crust of fine grounds in the hard-to-reach parts of the grinder, leaving your morning cup of coffee with a bitter taste.
Think about it: every time you grind coffee, tiny particles of beans and oils are shot into the tiny nooks and crannies of your coffee grinder. Organic matter is building up. This will impact your brew; adopting good coffee grinder cleaning practices is necessary to ensure your equipment is healthy and your coffee is as flavorful as it should be.
Mill Cleaning Objective and Tools
Those coffee particles and oils that accumulate may seem harmless now, but they'll soon begin to negatively affect your brew. These things are subject to decomposition by heat and oxygen, just like everything else, which means some undesirable flavors will begin to form. And these unpleasant flavors will be picked up by fresh, uncontaminated beans as they pass through.
So, essentially, the goal of cleaning is to remove soils and oils stuck in the burr area. This keeps your coffee intact and prolongs the life of your burrs.
There are several different cleaning methods. If you want to get rid of some of those small particles stuck in your coffee grinder as quickly as possible, you can try these simple cleaning methods:
Rice
Take a handful of uncooked instant rice and place it in the mill. Run the mill for about a minute, or until the rice resembles powder. The rice will remove trapped debris and help eliminate unpleasant odors. Discard the rice. Repeat this process until the rice comes out clean and white.
Salt
Pass a little kosher salt through your mill. Salt absorbs oils and odors without producing any itself. As with rice, you may need to pass the salt through a couple of times to truly dislodge all the caked-on particles.
Bread
If you don't have rice and don't want to use salt, you can also try cleaning your grinder with stale white bread. This works similarly to salt and rice, but with this method, you're not necessarily using food that's still edible. Again, you may need to run the bread through a couple of times to really clean it completely.
Oatmeal
Some suggest that you can also use oats for the same purpose.
Sugar
Sugar can also be used in a similar manner, but this is one of the methods that is better at helping with bad odor rather than removing leftover particles.
If you're looking to do a really deep clean, you can try these steps:
- Grind what remains in the mill.
- Turn it off and remove the plug from the outlet.
- Remove the hopper, hopper lid, grinding chamber, and grinding chamber lid. These components can be hand-washed with warm, soapy water. Make sure they are thoroughly dry before reusing.
- Use a toothbrush or similar brush to reach hard-to-reach places after removing the hopper.
- Remove the burr grinder. Use the brush or a damp cloth to remove any debris.
- Use compressed air to dislodge particles onto a trash can.
- Clean any area you can reach with a damp cloth.
- Replace the burr grinder. Make sure to turn it until it's fully inserted; otherwise, the hopper won't reattach properly.
- Clean the body of the mill with your damp cloth.
For coffee lovers, knowing how to clean the coffee grinder is something they should always be prepared for. Keeping it clean can take time. However, it's a necessary and important process. By keeping your grinder clean, you'll be able to ensure better brewing, which means you can always start your mornings off right.