You want to get started making awesome coffee at home but you’re on a limited budget. Understandable. As I have mentioned before, we aren’t all lawyers and accountants, but is that going to stop us from making kick ass coffee?
I think not.
So what do we do?
We go manual.
The secret to getting a good home coffee bar setup on little cash is to stick to the most rudimentary equipment possible, which is how I started making better coffee than a lot of coffee shops for less than the price of a Keurig. Oh yeah – and much more stylishly, I should add.
I would recommend that you read an article I wrote earlier comparing a number of the different manual conical burr grinders.
We also have an article about our exploits with the Hario Skerton, which is our personal favorite hand grinder.
The gist of it is this: if you are starting out and trying to cut costs without cutting out flavor potential and the opportunity for a seriously amazing extraction from the coffee bean than you need a conical burr grinder. We’ve rehashed this statement ad nauseam so I won’t go into it again any more than to say that starting out with a manual grinder is an excellent way to start grinding coffee like the pros without spending professional level money.
The conical burrs will allow for a crushed coffee bean, which contains all of the oils which create the flavors that you get in the cup. A blade grinder will just hack the beans to pieces, leaving you with what? Beans that have been hacked to pieces.
Yeah. So if you want coffee grounds get a burr grinder, if you want beans that have been hacked to pieces get a blade grinder.
And I said I wasn’t going to rehash that statement again.
I lied. Oh well.
So check out those articles comparing the different manual grinders and if you’re really interested in the Skerton, check out our exploits with it (we have a few of them).
And you’re all set to make amazing coffee at home with your new manual conical burr grinder.
When you buy one, let us know what you think of it, we would love to hear from all of you. Especially if you try some of the other one’s that we’ve compared. Do you like them more than the Skerton? If so, why?
We demand empirical data. And who knows, if we like your answer, we just might feature your thoughts in a future post.
