The Home Brew: 6 Tips for Maintaining your Coffee Grinder

The coffee grinder is one of the hard workers of one’s brewing set up. It’s responsible for making sure you get evenly ground coffee for your espressos or pour overs. To ensure the longevity of your coffee grinder, it’s important to be able to know the ways to maintain it easily. Today, we’ll go through 6 tips for maintaining your coffee grinder. This will help to not only keep it doing its job consistently for much longer, but it’s one of those things that as either a home brewer or a barista, you’d need to know to maintain a good workspace.

Preparing Your Cleaning Tools

Whether you have a manual or electric coffee grinder, there are a few key cleaning tools you’ll need to have on hand to make sure you can work on your grinder’s maintenance:

• A cleaning cloth (preferably a soft one like microfiber)
• A soft brush
• An air blower like a rubber bulb air pump or compressed air

If you’ve got a little bit more of a budget to clean up your grinder, you can also buy yourself a pack of coffee grinder cleaning tablets and save yourself a bit of time, but you’ll find that going through this maintenance process sans it will work just as well.

Keep Your Grinder Unplugged

The last thing you’ll want to do is to get into an accident while cleaning or maintaining your grinder, so make sure it’s plugged out. Obviously, if you have a manual coffee grinder then this doesn’t apply.

Clean the External Parts

If you’re using something like a Baratza Encore, then you’ll know that some of the parts are easily removable for cleaning and maintenance. The hopper and the catcher are both washable, so you can either wipe them down with a dry and soft cloth to get rid of any residual coffee fines or oils, or you can even opt to wash them. Just see to it that before you place them back in to ensure that they’re completely dry.

Work on the Burrs and the Insides

We now move on to the exciting part of the maintenance process of your coffee grinder, which are burr and the insides. For starters, you’ll want to consult a quick YouTube video on the burr removal process of your grinder just to make sure you keep yourself safe. Use your brush to get into those nooks and crannies of your burr grinder. Find any residual fines and keep on brushing. You can also use some air pressure to clean hard to reach parts of your burr and inside your coffee grinder. The air pressure will push out the grounds out of the grinder, and you’ll want to use your brush to make sure you clean the exit point as well.

Season the Grinder

If you have some old(er) coffee beans lying around or if you have the coffee you’ll be switching to as your daily driver, you can run a bit of it through your grinder to season it. This helps in making sure that you’ve put everything back together in one piece. It also helps by reintroducing a bit of coffee oils and grounds into the system so that it can regain a good flow. The reintroduction of oils also helps the burrs avoid getting rusty. Trust us when we say it really does help.

Rinse and Repeat

We hope that you don’t end up literally rinsing your grinder, but properly cleaning and maintaining your grinder regularly will keep it lasting for much longer. Keep a schedule to do this to keep your coffee grinder in tip-top shape. We hope these 6 tips for maintaining your coffee grinder will be of great help moving forward, and if you’ve got any more coffee set up and brewing questions, we at Plain Sight are always at the ready, just feel free to hit us up.