Getting a Cleaner Grind
As part of your regular cleaning ritual to make sure you have the best tasting espresso and coffee at home, don’t forget to include your grinder. Oils and stale coffee bits build up after weeks of use and can start to taint your brew. If you’ve ever ground flavored coffees or just notice that your grinder seems to be slowing down or giving inconsistent grinds, it may be time to give yours a clean.
If you have a standard blade grinder, it’s probably pretty easy to simply wipe out with a clean, damp cloth on a regular basis. This will keep most of the residue down, but you’ll still need to do a little something extra to remove oils and build up that the cloth doesn’t catch. If you have a burr grinder, even giving it a regular wipe can be a challenge, requiring disassembly. What you need is something that you can simply run through the grinder.
The low budget solution is minute rice. Put about 1/4 to 1/2 cup of rice into your grinder, and let it run all the way through. The rice absorbs the oil and basically dry-cleans the machine. This works great for blade grinders, and I’ve seen it recommended for some burr grinders as well. However, be warned… I’ve also seen reports that rice particles can jam up the inner workings of burr grinders. If you’ve shelled out $150 or more for a grinder, it’s worth investing in a bit more to keep it clean.
Urnex, the company that makes CleanCaf to remove residue from your espresso machine or coffee pot, has a product, GRINDZ, that does just that. Shaped like little coffee beans, these absorbent, food-safe pellets react like coffee beans in the grinder and seem to make it through without gumming up any parts. You just add a capful, and run them through as you would beans, and then using a soft brush, brush down any dust from the holding canister and doser. A large canister of Grindz is kind of expensive, but should last the home user a year or two, with fairly frequent cleanings.
Once you’ve run your cleaner through, you need to run a few batches of beans through to remove any cleaner particles. Although both the rice and the Grindz are both safe to consume, they won’t help the flavor of your coffee. Just run beans through that you don’t mind tossing, making sure you use unflavored beans. Run the junk beans through until you no longer get any white dust. I found that I needed to run almost a cup of beans through to remove the residue which is a bit annoying… but having a clean grinder is definitely worth it.
And, while I’m cleaning the inside, I figured I might as well give the outside of my machines a good spit and polish. Joe Glo cleaning clothes do just that. Little wet-naps quickly get that new look back, and work great on the outside of espresso machines, grinders, roasters… or other kitchen appliances like Kitchen Aid mixers! Joe Glo wipes are available from Northwest Espresso, or in this cool little kit at Amazon that comes with all the various brushes you need to give your machine a good cleaning inside and out.
Excellent post! I have this little cuisinart coffee grinder thats like 1 year old and never been cleaned. Sure it gets wiped out and such but not dry cleaned! I need to find me some minute rice and give it a try. Any chance I can use regular rice or is that too hard?