How To Clean Your Coffee Grinder
If you work a weekday schedule like I do, weekends have their own unique routine. When Saturday comes around it’s time do yard work, house cleaning, and some of those personal projects you’ve been putting off. I do have one weekly recurring appointment on Saturday mornings though, and it’s with my coffee grinder.
I actually set a reminder on my phone to keep me honest and cleaning my grinder because if I don’t it’s a an essential element of home brewing maintenance that I’m sure to neglect. Maybe you're reading this and it’s been a while since you’ve cleaned your grinder, or it’s possible that you've never even cleaned it out once. If that's the case, today's your day - you're going to start cleaning your grinder and here's why!
What is retention?
Each time you grind coffee on most grinders, a little bit of coffee gets left behind inside the machine. We call that retention. All of those grinds that get retained get pushed out by the next coffee you grind. So if you're switching up coffees often like I do, you're going to end up with a little bit of yesterday's Kenyan in this morning's Honduras.
Even if you’re not single dosing and drinking different coffees daily, the grounds that get retained aren’t fresh and will taint your cups over time.
So it’s essential that you clean your grinder, not only for the quality of your cup but for the care of that hard working piece of machinery. Here's how I clean my grinder, but this will apply to most burr grinders out there!
How To Clean Your Grinder
First things first is to carefully disassemble your grinder. Take apart things like the hopper, the beans bin, and your burrs if they're easily accessible. If you've never done this before, there's probably a guy or gal on YouTube that has - look it up!
Upper burr, paint brush, calibration tool, paper clip, burr remeover tool
Once disassembled it’s time to clean every part of your grinder that you can get to using only dry cleaning tools. It’s imperative that you keep moisture out of there at all costs. I use tools like the stiff brush that came with my grinder a paint brush I found in my basement (I know you have one lurking down there too…). I forged a paper clip by bending it that allows me to get into some nooks and crannies, and a vacuum helps me suck the grinds out instead of blowing them back in.
After you’ve brushed to breakup all the grounds and then vacuumed them up carefully, it’s time to put it all back together! If it's your first time it might be helpful to take pictures of each disassembly step so you can simply do those in reverse order when putting it all back in place.
And that’s it! I clean my Baratza Vario-W every week, usually on Saturday mornings. Sometimes I’ll miss a week and that’s ok. I don’t lose sleep over it knowing that I’ll get to it next week.
What grinder are you using? I’d love to know!
