How does one clean a manual coffee grinder?

by Jay Vinson
(Arlington, WI, USA)

QUESTION:

I have a manual grinder that cannot be fully taken apart. The grinding mechanism is adhered to its wooden housing. And, the wooden drawer that the ground coffee falls into and the surrounding wooden compartment are unfinished wood. This makes the use of liquids for cleaning difficult, if not impossible. Is there a solid or powdered substance that is used to clean these grinders? Something else?

Thanks for any help,

Jay Vinson


ANSWER:

Jay, hi

Take some uncooked white rice and grind it in the mill. The ground rice absorbs the oils left behind by the ground coffee.

And you're right to think about cleaning the mill, as the old oils build up and, over time, become rancid and add a bitter taste to the fresh coffee beans you grind.

Simply run the rice through your coffee mill a few times. Finally, run some coffee beans through the mill to pick up any fragments of rice and discard the first batch of ground coffee.

Then you'll be ready to start grinding perfect coffee again.

Myself, I have also found that from time to time you need to tighten up any screws or bolts. Hand grinding is pretty tough on a small grinder, and puts a lot of stress on the moving parts.

That said, I love using a quality manual burr coffee grinder. There is something about feeling the coffee being ground that makes for a much richer coffee-making experience, when compared to just pressing a button on an electric grinder.