The last time I checked, a no-frills cuppa joe cost around $2 at the local Starbucks. That doesn't include steamed milk, shots of espresso, exotic flavorings, or any Italian phrases. Just black coffee made with the house blend.

Why would one pay such a ridiculous sum for a simple cup of coffee? Although hoity-toity coffee experts often ridicule places like Starbucks for passing off sludge as gourmet java, the truth is that for the average consumer, coffee from a coffeehouse (even Starbucks) tastes better than coffee made at home. Even if you pay an exorbitant price for a bag of expensive pre-ground specialty coffee, it still doesn't taste quite as fresh or flavorful at home as it does in the store.

The secret when it comes to coffee is that the quality of the ingredients is not necessarily the most important factor in determining the quality of the end result. This isn't to say that it doesn't contribute at all - if all other things are equal, a beverage brewed from high-quality coffee will taste better than one brewed from low-quality coffee. However, when comparing coffee from a coffeehouse to coffee made at home, all other things are not equal.

Why Grind?

The main predictors of the quality of a cup of coffee are the methods of preparation and brewing. No matter what the quality of the original coffee beans, shoddy preparation will always result in a shoddy beverage. The first step in preparing to brew a tasty cup of coffee is grinding the beans. That's right: if you want to have any hope of approximating the quality of coffee from a coffeehouse, you'll have to grind your own beans. To ensure a rich, flavorful cup of coffee every time, you should only grind the amount you need immediately before you need it.

From the moment that coffee beans are ground, they begin losing their flavor. Even if you buy pre-ground coffee in fancy, vacuum-sealed packaging, you are still going to expose the grounds to air as soon as you open the package. You also have no idea how long the ground coffee was exposed to air in the factory before it was inserted into that vacuum-sealed container. If you buy whole beans and have them ground at the store before bringing them home, you know exactly how fresh the grind is. However, unless you buy small amounts of fresh-ground coffee frequently, chances are that most of your purchase will start going stale before you have a chance to use it.

Some people recommend refrigerating or freezing ground coffee in order to preserve the fresh flavor and aroma. Don't listen to them. Refrigerators and freezers have humid environments, and the only thing that robs coffee grounds of their flavor faster than exposure to air is exposure to moisture. That is, after all, why water is so effective in leaching the flavor from the coffee grounds during brewing.

Cheap (but still relatively fresh-roasted) beans that were ground immediately before brewing will produce a decent cup of coffee that beats a cup made from most types of pre-ground coffees. Freshly grinding beans of high quality can elevate the taste of home-brewed coffee to the divine.

Blade Grinders

The most common type of coffee grinder available on the market is the blade grinder, also known as a whirlyblade model. This type of grinder resembles a small blender, with a single metal blade or set of blades that spin very rapidly. As the blade spins, it hacks the whole coffee beans into coffee grounds. Most blade grinders have a simple on/off button and operate at a single speed when on. The user regulates the coarseness of the grind by controlling the amount of time the grinder is turned on - the longer the grinder runs, the finer the grounds.

The main advantage to blade grinders is that they're cheap to manufacture and therefore cheap to purchase; most retail for less than $30 USD. For coffee novices, blade grinders do a seemingly decent job of preparing coffee grounds for the average drip coffeemaker. They're easy to use and are relatively small as far as electric appliances go, so they don't take up a lot of counter space (many are small enough to fit in a drawer). In addition, blade grinders can be put to a variety of other interesting uses to meet all of your grinding needs.

One of the major disadvantages of using a blade grinder is variable granularity. Although the user can approximately control the average size of the grounds, blade grinders do not produce particles of a uniform size. Some of the grounds will be large chunks, while others will be so fine as to qualify as dust. You can mitigate this effect to a limited extent by repeatedly inverting or shaking the grinder throughout the grinding process. This increases the chances that the large particles, which would otherwise sink to the bottom of the grounds, will make a repeat trip through the blades to become smaller particles. This technique is hardly foolproof, however.

A grind that is not uniform causes problems because grounds of different sizes release their oils at different rates when mixed with hot water. Small particles tend to release their flavor more quickly than large particles. Using an uneven grind in a drip coffeemaker will result in uneven-tasting coffee, with some of it tasting disgustingly bitter and some of it tasting unusually weak. The best one can hope for in this situation is that there are equal amounts of bitter and weak tastes that will almost (but not quite) cancel each other out when mixed together in the pot - although this is blasphemy to coffee connoisseurs, who consider an inconsistent cup of coffee to be undrinkable. Also, there are some brewing methods, such as a french press or espresso machine, that have rigorous requirements for a uniformly coarse or fine grind. Violating these requirements really will render an undrinkable cup of coffee, by anyone's standards.

Another disadvantage to blade grinders is heat transfer. Blade grinders tend to produce a lot of friction and heat, partly due to the fact that the design requires longer grinding times for finer grinds, and partly due to the cheap quality of the vast majority of blade grinders on the market. This heat is easily transferred from the metal blade to the coffee grounds themselves, which can cause a beverage brewed from these grounds to taste stale or even slightly burnt.

Despite the blade grinder's many faults, using one will still produce a better cup of coffee than using mass-produced pre-packaged ground coffee like Folger's or Maxwell House. Cash-strapped folks who own a drip coffeemaker and are not rigid coffee fanatics will generally find that a blade grinder's output is adequate. However, if you have the time and money, you'd be better off buying small amounts of whole beans at least a couple times a week and having them ground at the store using a commercial grinder. If you have the money but don't have the time for frequent shopping trips, or you want to brew your coffee using a method less forgiving than a drip coffeemaker, you might want to investigate burr grinders.

Burr Grinders

A burr grinder is a miniature version of the commercial grinders used at coffeehouses. They have a hopper in back or on top for loading whole coffee beans. After falling through a hole in the bottom of the hopper, the beans are passed between two burred (i.e. textured) metal surfaces known simply as the "burrs." One of the burrs is stationary, while the other is in constant motion to crush the coffee beans (based on the same principle underlying a mortar and pestle or a grist mill). The finished product is expelled through a chute into a grind bin at the front of the machine. The coarseness of the grind is controlled by the distance between the burrs, ensuring that the ground size is uniform. Burr grinders are also known as coffee mills, although some people feel that the term "coffee mill" should be reserved for manually operated (as opposed to motorized) burr grinders.

Burr grinders come in two varieties: flat wheel grinders and conical grinders. In wheel grinders, the burrs are flat and circular in shape, with one burr lying directly on top of the other. As the name would imply, conical grinders have burrs shaped like cones, with one burr nestled inside the other. Flat burrs are cheaper to replace, easier to clean, and grind coffee slightly faster. The main argument in favor of conical grinders is that the cone-shaped burrs do a better job of diffusing heat than their flat wheel cousins. Supposedly (and this is hotly contested amongst the coffee-loving community), conical burrs also produce a more consistent grind than wheel burrs of a similar size.

Generally speaking, low-end burr grinders have flat burrs, while high-end burr grinders are of the conical variety. One exception to this rule is industrial grinders, which are usually equipped with flat wheel burrs due to the volume of coffee these grinders must process on a daily basis. The flat burrs in the industrial grinders are relatively large to produce a consistent grind, and have separate cooling systems on each burr to aid in heat dispersal. If this sounds like overkill, remember that these types of grinders are designed to operate continuously for hours at a time, while most home coffee grinders will only operate for a few minutes each day.

There is one huge disadvantage to burr grinders: price. Typically, burr grinders retail for anywhere between $30 and $300 USD. For the most part, the quality of the grinder is proportional to the cost, although certainly some of the more expensive grinders are priced based more on style or brand name recognition than quality. At the lower end of the spectrum, burr grinders are made mostly out of plastic and have relatively small flat-wheel burrs. Cheap burr grinders are often poorly calibrated, meaning that the spacing between the burrs is not even, so the grind will not be entirely consistent (however, the cheapest burr grinder will still produce more consistent grounds than the most expensive blade grinder). More expensive burr grinders usually have conical burrs, are manufactured with more metal than plastic, and allow the user to recalibrate the burrs so that the grind is always even.

Some experts suggest that there is no such thing as a good burr grinder that costs less than $100. They imply that not drinking coffee at all would be preferable to drinking coffee prepared with a budget-friendly burr grinder. These people are, in this author's estimation, pretentious snobs. While the old cliché that "you get what you pay for" holds some truth in regards to burr grinders, this does not render reasonably priced burr grinders useless. In reality, the purchase of a particular burr grinder should be based on the brewing methods that you plan to use at home. If, for example, you plan to primarily use a drip coffeemaker or a low-cost french press, then you can get a perfectly adequate burr grinder for quite a bit less than $100. However, if you're the proud owner of a $900 espresso machine, don't hobble your coffee with a cheap grinder - spring for a conical burr grinder to get a consistent, professional-quality grind.

Sources:

• "Grinders: Blades, Burrs, or Biceps?" http://www.jlhufford.com/ARTICLES/grinding.htm.
• "Grinding Coffee." http://www.coffeeam.com/grindingcoffee.html
• Joshua, Myron. "Grind Your Own Beans." http://www.ineedcoffee.com/01/01/grind/.
• Schaefer, Chris. "Home Coffee Grinders." http://www.seasoned.com/issues/199809/f.pr.p1.html.