Why Rinse the Grinder Before Brewing Coffee? How to Clean a Coffee Grinder? Will Not Rinsing the Grinder Cause Off-Flavors in Pour-Over Coffee?

"Grinder cleaning," as the name suggests, is the act of cleaning a coffee grinder. To ensure that your grinder has a longer lifespan, we need to perform a deep cleaning of it every so often to ensure that its burrs and other components are not affected by external dirt and debris.

However, "grinder cleaning" is not just about this type of cleaning. Before we grind coffee beans for pour-over coffee each time, we also need to perform a grinder cleaning procedure. This is a point that many experienced baristas will emphasize when teaching beginners. So the question arises: what's the difference between cleaning the grinder before grinding coffee powder and the regular scheduled cleaning?

Why Should You Always Clean the Grinder Before Grinding Coffee Beans?

The grinder cleaning we often mention before grinding is actually not about using professional cleaning tools to disassemble and wash the grinder, but rather about putting in a few coffee beans to grind, thus achieving the "grinder cleaning" effect! And this cleaning method allows us to produce a more纯粹 taste for our pour-over coffee!

Removing Residual Coffee Powder

Its biggest benefit is cleaning out the coffee powder residues hidden inside the grinder! When a batch of coffee beans enters the grinder and is ground into coffee powder, not all particles will fall out from the grinder exit. A small portion of finer particles might adhere to the burrs due to static electricity or remain in the gaps of the burrs and the empty spaces within the grinder.

If we don't clean out these particles, they will mix into the next batch of ground coffee. This not only brings extraction differences to the next batch of coffee powder but also makes the newly ground coffee taste less pure. Therefore, we need to use a few beans from the "same batch" as the coffee beans about to be ground to act as cleaners, bringing out the coffee powder residues left inside the machine! This is the "grinder cleaning" before grinding.

However! The amount of these coffee beans acting as cleaners cannot be too small. If the quantity is too small, there's a small probability that they won't be able to bring out the coffee powder left in dead corners, rendering the cleaning ineffective. Therefore, FrontStreet Coffee suggests using 1g or about 4-5 beans. Although this may be unfriendly to your wallet, it ensures that the最终 extracted coffee taste is not affected by other flavors, making it quite cost-effective in the long run! Many friends might wonder, can't an air blower also blow out coffee powder residues from the grinder? Why not use an air blower for cleaning? Isn't this more time and money-saving?

The answer is simple, because often, what's left in the grinder is not just coffee powder!

Removing Oils and Flavors

To taste more different delicious flavors, we use different coffee beans for brewing and extraction. Coffee beans themselves contain oils, especially medium to dark roasted beans, which have a richer oil content. So when we grind, if these oils stick to the burrs, they become something that an air blower cannot remove.

Yesterday, FrontStreet Coffee's article mentioned that oils carry some of the flavor compounds of the coffee beans themselves. So if we don't clean them thoroughly, when the next batch of coffee beans is ground, the oils attached to the burrs will transfer to the newly ground coffee powder, thus causing deviations in the extracted coffee taste. Although it might be a better experience, I believe most people would rather taste the original, most pure single-origin flavor of coffee beans. Therefore, to prevent this situation from occurring, we still need to use coffee beans for grinder cleaning before grinding to reduce the occurrence of these variables.

But this type of cleaning cannot provide a cleaning function for the entire grinder; it only reduces variables that might occur in the current brewing. So we still need to perform regular cleaning of the grinder and not confuse the two! (For how to clean the grinder, you can refer to this article: "Coffee Grinder Cleaning")

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