Grinding coffee is a necessary part of that morning cup of Joe you enjoy every morning. If you’ve never seen a coffee bean…where have you been? No, seriously, they’re called beans for a reason—they look like beans—duh! To get to the stage where you combine them with water to create the wake-up juice, you have to grind them.

How you grind those beans is up to you—manual coffee grinder with an old-fashioned handle you work with a little elbow grease, a burr grinder which grinds the beans between wheels or discs, or chopping—maybe using your blender. There are also a couple of specialty methods.

If you pound the beans to a fine powder, you’ll end up with what’s known as Turkish coffee. You can also roller grind them, but if you have a roller grinder you probably own some industrial coffee business—they’re big.

All of these different grinder types produce different effects on your cup. The manual grinder gives you a sore elbow, and who wants that? Burr grinding gives you a bunch of ground up pieces that are a pretty uniform size.

This gives you an even extraction of flavor, and you don’t get tiny little bits of bean passing through your filter.
Usually a burr grinder has different settings so you can control how coarse or fine the coffee ends up.

Different methods of brewing require different grinds from super-coarse to super-fine. Oh—and chopping? Messy. You can get a lot of coffee dust that can clog your espresso machine, or end up as a film in your cup.
Yuck. Point being—to get from beans to brew, you need a grinder. From Krups to Cuisinart, from Braun to Mr. Coffee–just check them out and pick!