Getting granular on grinders
- Education
FIND THE RIGHT ONE FOR YOUR VENUE
At 200 Degrees we’ve recently replaced the coffee grinders in our shops so we thought it a good time to give you a kindly parental lecture about “the burrs and the beans,” particularly to those folks also working with coffee in their own shops and businesses. If you’re serving a lot of customers with high quality coffee from a traditional espresso machine, it’s important to realise how essential your grinder is.
The five things you need to consider are:
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COST – Purchase and upkeep
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SPEED – Faster the better, especially if you’re a busy team
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SIMPLICITY – Because those busy teams need simple solutions
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ACCURACY – Getting the taste exactly right for your customers
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WASTE REDUCTION – less coffee lost means less waste and lower costs in the long run
There are three main types of grinders out there so here’s a brief intro to each:
MANUAL DOSING GRINDERS
These are the cheaper, old-school grinders that you see with a big chamber of beans at the top and half a ton of ground coffee at the bottom, slowly going stale. They’re relatively inaccurate, wasteful and should be pretty much obsolete in reputable establishments like the one you own. So let’s swiftly move on to....
ON DEMAND GRINDERS
These are great machines for cafes and bars and deliver consistently accurate and fresh doses of coffee whilst being easy to clean and maintain. Look for names like Arduino and Simonelli and expect to pay around £1000. A small amount of coffee is ground directly into the group handle, so you only grind what you need for that cup. Waste is at most 1-2g per shot making them much more accurate and cost effective than Manual Dosing.
GRIND BY WEIGHT
The latest development in grinders are fast, simple and have in built scales exact to around 0.1g in a 17.5g shot. That’s an imperceptibly small variation to taste and virtually no waste and from a sustainability and margin point of view. For anyone serving a serious amount of coffee these machines come in at around twice the price front end of a manual dosing grinder but provide much bigger savings over time. We have just put these incredible machines into our 22 coffee shops and the latest Mahlkönig models available to buy or rent now from our Wholesale team.
Get in touch with our team here.
Looking for grinder for your home? The same rules apply, just on a smaller scale, and you can peruse the range we have available here.